Cameron Mackintosh said Djalili's ability "to inhabit his characters with such comic energy and wily cunning" made him the natural successor to Atkinson. Djalili will take over the role from 20 July, appearing alongside Jodie Prenger, who is scheduled to continue in her role as Nancy until 12 December This article is more than 12 years old. Standup and Hollywood villain to take over the role in the West End production this summer. Ready to review the situation But Atkinson is at his best in Reviewing The Situation, where, responding to the kletzmer echoes in Bart's music and the plangent sound of a solo violin, he twists his body into a state of corkscrewing indecision as he dithers between crime and respectability.
If this revival is worth catching, it is largely for Atkinson's saturnine comic presence. The good news is that she acquits herself extremely well. The role, as written, makes little sense, in that one minute Nancy is declaring her undying love for Bill Sikes in As Long As He Needs Me, and the next betraying him to the good guys.
But Prenger delivers her big number with passionate fervour. She is even better in the raucous Oom-Oom-Pah where the stage fills with Hogarthian detail as plump women retch into buckets and copulation thrives in the dark corners of the Three Cripples pub. This is about as good as the show, or Matthew Bourne's choreography, gets. For the rest, there are too many Cockney knees-ups in which characters actually do stick their thumbs into their waistcoat sides.
And, although the house adored Ross McCormack's pint-sized, top-hatted Artful Dodger, he seemed to me too aware of his cute charm. But this is the basic problem with a show altogether too full of beery cheer and too little conscious of the darkness of Dickens's imagination.
Goold stages it with fluent efficiency, and Anthony Ward's sets, with their perspectives of St Paul's and their sliding bridges, are handsome to look at. But too many of the characters are ciphers, and the plot is largely a device for getting the numbers on. Only once did I feel an authentic whiff of Dickens — the creepy dual performances of Julian Bleach as a spindly, necrophiliac undertaker, and then a toothfully grinning, incompetent Dr Grimwig.
For the most part, however, this is Dickens as jolly family entertainment stripped of the sense of solitude that has roots in the author's own experience and that makes Oliver Twist such a disturbing novel. Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
Comic but camply sinister Rowan Atkinson as Fagin.
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