... In the Workhouse and The Oracle Lunchtime KING'S HEAD THESE ARE two revivals of plays long forgotten; one a light, trite 18th century piece, the other an expository turn-of-the centry dialogue on the horrific predicament of improverished married women ...

... five hands and four ghosts. It started somewhat strangely in an 1 843 Carshalton haberdashery store with fugitives from the workhouse dossing down for the night. But it put all the costumes and props ready to hand for quick on stage changes in a very mobile ...

... that this is a show that is in no need of reinvention. Lionel Bart himself put it all in the poignant opening in the gloomy workhouse, the repressive work driven horrors of the undertaker's house, the happy go lucky illegality of Fagin's underground lair ...

... designer has created the world of nineteenth-century London by means of swinging wooden beams, which enclose the boys in their workhouse, suggest the furtive secrecy of the thieves' kitchen, and finally swing into place to make London Bridge, its lights shining ...

... character, and at the end battles on into another life. The Brownlow family, so important in the book in contrasting Oliver's workhouse life to true kindness and understanding, gets the most perfunc tory of mentions, before being rapidly merged with the Maylies' ...

... But although deaf and blind, she is strong-willed and intelligent. She meets her match in Annie Sullivan, brought up in a workhouse and herself half-blind. The struggle to teach discipline to a child who cannot be spoken to reaches its climax in the now ...

... written and presented with enormous gusto, i that went boldly and often success- lly lor the simple pathos of the title workhouse boy at the mercy 0 cruel chance in the rough and 'lister London imaginatively evoked by Mr. Sean Kenny's 'genious arrangements ...

... warm and jolly and Pickwickian, the other that is dark and grim and linked with the dirt and brutality of factories and workhouses. Dickens indeed was a sort of conjuror in relation to the people of his time. He drew reels and reels of highly coloured ...

... between thrawn Kitty and the great mother-figure are memorable. So many are of the scenes such as the grey procession of workhouse parents, once a week, to visit their cut-off children. Yet also there is more than a streak of cosiness: our Ma baking ...

... whose houses might be burnt down if brushes were used, and likely to do harm to the boys who might otherwise idle in the workhouse. The boys were thoroughly happy. If they died young, was not the country grievously over- populated? And were not a number ...