Two Faces of Fagin
ELIZABETH ALLEN
Most of the audience for Steve Furst’s show at the Stables admitted that they had never read Dickens’ Oliver Twist, but they did know Fagin, one of those characters who has a life somehow independent of the work in which he appears. Steve Furst is an actor, comedian, and song-and-dance man, and this performance, complete with the music hall device of direct addresses to the audience, was highly entertaining.
Yet, as I only gradually recognised, it was a lecture heavy with information but lightly presented. We examined the significance of the fact that in the earlier sections of the novel Dickens refers to him almost exclusively as ‘The Jew’ rather than by name. We heard how the author was rebuked for this and later sought to make amends by offering, in Our Mutual Friend, the gentle, near-saintly character of Jewish moneylender Mr Riah. We recognised the way in which both Oliver Twist and Cruikshank’s famous illustrations both constructed and reinforced the stereotype of the greedy and evil Jew.
And Fagin, of course, had a considerable afterlife in the twentieth century through Lionel Bart’s immortally successful Oliver! Bart himself was born Lionel Begleiter, the youngest of seven children of a Jewish family who escaped from the pogroms in Ukraine to settle finally in Stepney. His father worked, in a garden shed, as a tailor. It may have been ‘natural’, therefore, for Bart to modify the character of Fagin to make him into a lovable rogue, a father figure with a questioning conscience. “I’m re-viewing the situation,” he tells the audience (and Furst’s performance of the song was impeccable) “If you want to eat you’ve got to earn a bob/Is it such a humiliation/For a robber to perform an honest job?” Or, the character modification is just as likely to have been a stroke of genius, something that he knew would make splendid theatre. Bart was recognised by Andrew Lloyd Webber as “the father of the British musical”, writing at the time song after successful song, collaborating with, and writing for, other entertainment legends who had also transcended early London working-class poverty – Anthony Newley,Tommy Steele, Adam Faith.
Furst’s performance was delivered with such energy and engagement that we did not simply watch and learn, but experienced the vitality of the character, who leapt off the page and out of the story into different ages and aspects of cultural history.
Dickens was himself a man of the theatre, declaring an ambition to be a professional actor and having several plays produced on the public stage. His highly dramatic readings of scenes from his novels drew massive crowds. He would surely have enjoyed this performance, its skilled and irresistible relationship with the audience, and its mix of the serious and the playful.
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