Oliver Twist

COMING SOON ...

Filter is reimagining Oliver Twist as a bold, diverse and sustainable production for mid-to large-scale UK theatres.

Writer John Haidar is adapting Dickens’ classic tale to uncover the beating heart of the novel and reshape it for today’s audiences with the trademark wit, energy and sonic imagination of Filter’s previous work.

Oliver Twist is Dickens’s study of lost children: children who actually get lost, like Oliver and the Artful Dodger, and adults like Sykes and Nancy who never really leave the child they were behind. The novel is also an anatomy of urban poverty, a broken care system, forced child labour, domestic violence and racial prejudice, societal issues that not only exist but which, in 2026, are on the rise.

Sound is central to the production featuring ambisonic microphones to immerse audiences in Dickens’s London - from the backstreets of the East End to the workhouse, the undertakers to the leafy suburbs.

The stage design will be expressionistic rather than literal: dreamlike, fragmentary, as if seen through a child’s eyes. A world built from stolen trinkets, old and new, with characters dressed across time periods, a collision of Victorian and contemporary society.

Filter's Oliver Twist will be a powerful, imaginative and socially resonant production for today’s audiences.