Bartlett's vision is clear from the first moment, when a plain black curtain rises to reveal the darkly ingenious box of a set. Bartlett (who last visited the ART in 2005 with "Dido, Queen of Carthage") has said that he and his longtime collaborator, Rae Smith, developed the design after studying Victorian "penny dreadful" machines, small dioramas that displayed thrilling scenes of mayhem to anyone with a penny to spare. It's a striking idea, and one that plays well with Dickens's own propensity for heightened emotions and stark contrasts.
As the action proceeds, the actors pull levers or open doors to transform the space; this simple box becomes, in a flash, the workhouse where Oliver is born, Fagin's den of pickpockets, a busy street, a genteel parlor, or London Bridge. By a similar magic, 11 of the company's 13 members (all but Fagin and Oliver ) don cloaks or shed hats to fill the stage with a whole throng of Dickens's vivid eccentrics, saints, and villains.
Light and sound, too, work in concert to create a whole and wholly fascinating experience of Bartlett's Dickens. Sometimes footlights evoke the stylized gloom of Victorian melodrama; sometimes an ethereal beam from above illuminates a brief moment of hope amid the murk. Songs -- Dickens's words, set to old music-hall tunes -- punctuate and underscore the action, as does an oddly appropriate Victorian trio of violin, hurdy-gurdy, and serpent (a snaky tube that sounds like a foghorn, only less melodious).
In such a thoroughly imagined and carefully crafted world, it seems only natural that the actors should act in deeply unnatural ways. These are not real people, or even real characters; they are, self-consciously, actors enacting a whole culture's worth of stereotypes, caricatures, and tropes.
