Dodge & Twist by Tony Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars A Disappointing and Unconvincing Victorian Heist Drama Imagine that twelve years older Oliver Twist returns to London after his adoptive father Mr. Brownlow has passed away, and, still innocent and gullible, soon finds himself under the sway of the Artful Dodger, who involves him in an overly elaborate and highly unconvincing heist plot in an Audible Original Drama called Dodge & Twist (2018) by Tony Lee. It goes without saying, but despite inserting other characters from Dickens’ original novel (including Noah Claypool, Charly Bates, and the “ghost” of Fagin) and a few new ones written for Dodge and Twist (2018), Lee is no Dickens and his drama no Oliver Twist. It is often entertaining, and endowed with surprises (dodging and twisting) and some 19th-century London details like Newgate Prison, street urchins, and police (called “crushers”), but the characters are unappealing, Oliver disappointing, the action unbelievable, and the dialogue often off, so that even though it’s only about 4.5 hours long and free to Audible members to boot, I started wondering if it was worth spending time on. I would have preferred less heist and more social commentary re poverty and the class system. There are some excruciating scenes, as when Betsy, the younger sister of the ill-fated Nancy from the original novel, working in tandem with Oliver, tries to seduce Percival Bateman, a stuffy British Museum expert, leading to embarrassing dialogue between, Oliver, Bateman, and Betsy, with Betsy calling the guy Percy one moment, Mr. Bateman the next, and acting coarsely and transparently fake. I can’t believe that in the 1850s people would say things like, “Perhaps we could go to dinner” and “I do. I do like you.” They wouldn’t talk so casually and so suggestively to each other so quickly. I don’t believe any of this part of the story at all. And it’s all in the service of one element of Dodger/Fagin’s intricate heist plan. More corny dialogue occurs, like: Oliver is “an innocent in a room full of vipers all ready to strike,” and “Follow those carriages!” and “This ends now,” not to mention, “We end this now.” Being a product of the 21st century, Lee writes a plethora of pistols into his drama (there are way too many one-shot pistols) and makes his characters more morally ambiguous than Dickens’, good figures from the novel like Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Grimwig, and Oliver’s father receiving compromising back stories and bad guys from the novel like Noah and Fagin having some sympathetic touches brushed on them. Being an audible drama, this production features sound effects and urgent, strident violin music. Often there will be some violent action and we hear the characters grunting or shouting but have no idea what’s happening till the aftermath of the action explains what just happened, a drawback to the radio-drama medium as produced here. The voice acting is generally fine. I preferred Terry Pratchet’s earlier novel Dodger (2012), which presents the Artful One as a “tosher,” exploring and searching the labyrinthine network of sewer tunnels under London, a Fagin figure, a young social reformer reporter type called Charles Dickens, and so on (but no Oliver Twist). If you can get Dodge and Twist for free and are in the need of a diverting though at times exasperating four-and-half-hours’ entertainment, and are a fan of Oliver Twist, you could try this, and I was not enticed by the prospect of a sequel broadly hinted at in the end. View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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