Atkinson hailed for Oliver! role

Critics heaped praise on the Blackadder star following his opening-night performance yesterday.

The show at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, has already beaten box office records thanks to publicity from the primetime BBC One talent show I’ll Do Anything, which cast newcomer Jodie Prenge as Nancy. But reviewers were in little doubt who was the real star of the show.

Telegraph theatre critic Charles Spencer declared: ‘Rowan Atkinson is both sinister and hilarious as Fagin, which is just as it should be, sings pretty well, and brings some deliciously deft comic touches to the role.’

In the Guardian, Michael Billington wrote: ‘Rowan Atkinson turns in a sprightly, distinctive performance. Atkinson's Fagin may be essentially comic but he endows the character with a camply sinister edge.’

The Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts said: ‘Rowan Atkinson, playing that warped scout master Fagin, was the eyebrow-wriggling, funny-walking, laugh-wringing supremo of the show last night.’

And The Times’s reviewer Benedict Nightingale adds: ‘All credit to Atkinson for giving Fagin at least as much menace as Jonathan Pryce and Robert Lindsay, who were superlative in Sam Mendes’s revival of the musical 14 years ago.’ He added that Atkinson ‘gratuitously reassures the audience’ with some comic business, before reverting to ‘an infinitely creepy criminal with lank hair, a yellow face and a sinister, silvery glint in his eyes’.

Only Michael Coveney in the Independent raised any doubts over Atkinson’s performance, questioning the quality of his singing voice and suggesting he could be more ‘gleeful’.

‘Is Rowan Atkinson any good as Fagin?’ he wrote. ‘Fairly good, fairly funny, but he can't sing very well, and keeps missing the beat.

‘He's funniest when fingering his stolen gems, or kicking his legs above his head in a sideways exit. But he's not a malevolent, gleeful, stage-hogging, dubiously paedophiliac monster that you long for and Lionel Bart wrote, even if Charles Dickens didn't.’

Published: 15 Jan 2009