Adam Long, the writer and director of this dreadful dog’s breakfast of a show, claims to be a “complete devotee” of the Dickens novels, but as the old Spike Jones song once told us, with appropriate sound effects, “You always hurt the one you love (ouch!!).” My response to what Long and his little team of pain-makers have perpetrated here is not even an ouch but a glum recognition of the depths to which comedy can sink.

A co-founder of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Long is the man who inflicted The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) upon us, an atrocity that sat like a toad at the Criterion Theatre for ten years. The style of this new thing is the same, a mention of most of the works, some being let off lightly with a joky summary in a four-line verse, while others are minced into a parade of silly sketches where memorable incidents are sent up.

The targeted audience will be those familiar only with TV and cinema versions of the books, who remember that Fagin surrounded himself with little boys, Tiny Tim didn’t die and somebody went to the guillotine.

An interesting moment in the production comes when the actor playing Dickens is outraged at the way the workhouse boys are shown jumping about in musical joy, all but singing Food, Glorious Food. He persuades the actors playing Fagin and Oliver to enter the reality of the Condemned Cell scene, and the effect is poignant. But poignancy would turn off the punters so it’s back at once to the mockery.

The 12-year-old Dickens’s fateful toil at Warren’s Blacking Factory is distorted in tone but (a grudging concession) amusingly presented, and in the black-smeared figure of Mr Warren provides a bogeyman to haunt the novelist’s imagination. But the profound effect of witnessing poverty and abuse goes for nothing. The remorseless emphasis on devising shock tactics to generate giggles is like having Mickey Mouse in Guernica.

When Joseph Attenborough’s Copperfield tells the devoted Agnes that he loves another, Simon Jermond’s response shows the turmoil of dismay conflicting with courtesy in a manner both convincing and comic. This is subtle acting in a show where subtlety is elsewhere kept very low on the menu.

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