Giles Woodforde enjoys an entertaining musical performance of Oliver! that left the audience wanting more

In 1998 the tiny Watermill Theatre first challenged the West End at the glitzy-musical game, with its own small-scale production of Cabaret. Since then several Watermill musicals have made it the other way, into the West End – and their Sweeney Todd ended up winning awards on Broadway.

This year, the Watermill has selected Lionel Bart’s Oliver! Musicals don’t come much more mega than this one – the last professional revival was at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with Rowan Atkinson playing Fagin, boss of the pint-sized pickpockets. If director Luke Sheppard faced challenges in scaling Oliver! down, it certainly doesn’t show, for bolted onto the adult cast are teams of children from the thriving Watermill youth company – several of them coming from across the Oxfordshire boundary.

The children make an immediate impact as they bang their spoons on empty plates in the opening company number, Food, Glorious Food – all dead in time with the music. Real tension is generated as the sound level drops back, and Oliver utters the immortal line “Please, sir, I want some more”.

Arthur Burdess played Oliver the night I saw the show, and he certainly looks and sounds the part – a spot more projection will no doubt come as the run proceeds, and nerves recede. He also contrasts perfectly with the cheekily-grinning Ed Betton, one of three alternating Artful Dodgers. The staging of Consider Yourself One of Us, exuberantly delivered as Dodger introduces Oliver to the other members of Fagin’s gang, is one of the highlights of the show – Paul Herbert’s new musical arrangements are spot on, and they are well tailored to the instrumental skills of the adult actors, who double as a first-class band.

Meanwhile, Cameron Blakely presents Fagin as an intriguing enigma. His delivery of Reviewing the Situation, all twisting body motions and sinewy fingers, will live long in my memory.

The second half starts with Oom-pah-pah, a good old singsong number. For some strange reason this is staged in the Watermill’s idyllic garden, which is as far as you can get from the grimy, Victorian London setting atmospherically evoked by Tom Rogers’s indoor set designs. Apart from that aberration, this is a terrific production – fizzy and thoroughly entertaining, but never sugar coating the dark theme of child exploitation that lies at the heart of Dickens’s original book.

* Oliver! continues at the Watermill, Newbury, until September 19.