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Less, please, of this overblown Oliver! PATRICK MARMION reviews Oliver! at London's Gielgud Theatre

Thanks to a famously unbeatable roster of music hall tunes - from Food Glorious Food to Consider Yourself - it's a big, beaming, toe-tapping lark.

That’s why I find it odd that Cameron Mackintosh’s much-feted revival (first seen in Chichester last year), directed by the choreographer Matthew Bourne, seems anxious to remind us that life below the poverty line in 19th-century London was no joke. The real-life battering to death in the 1930s of a mother and daughter by their two servants, the Papin sisters, became a cause célèbre — and the inspiration of Jean Genet’s 1947 ‘absurdist’ play The Maids, a radical psychological study of class, power and revenge. There is the usual goofy comedy; a nervous ‘golf ball’ (a woman’s head, in white dimpled swimming cap, sticking through a hole in the stage) waits while a bumbling giant in plus fours swings a club.

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