Cheesy remake of Our Mutual Friend: London Tide, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more forgettable than the original. Why change the name? To confuse fans of Dickens, presumably, and to keep the theatre half-empty while heaps of tickets are sold at a discount.

At the end of Act One, an actor explains the entire plot. This might have been delivered earlier

The plot is a cheesy Victorian whodunnit involving three main characters and multiple locations so it’s hard to follow the action as it flits from this lowly hovel to that seedy tavern. The chief personalities are a pretentious lawyer, a psychotic teacher and a shifty lodger who won’t reveal his name. Could the shifty lodger be connected to a stingy millionaire who recently died and left a fortune to his estranged son on the condition that he marries a haughty young woman? Yes he could. This framework is fleshed out with 20 or so ‘lovable Cockneys’ from Dickens’s store-cupboard of cheery East-End chatterboxes.

The most unlikely figure on stage is a deranged schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone, played by Scott Karim (who could be Nick Cave’s doppelgänger). Headstone is a schizophrenic character who poses as a saviour of illiterate waifs during the day but who turns into a crazed thug at the stroke of midnight. He stalks his love rivals through the streets and attacks them with a cudgel before tossing their semi-conscious bodies into the Thames. His personality makes no sense at all. Nor does the play’s health-and-safety message. Several characters drown during the runtime but no one learns to swim.

At the end of the first act, which lasts 100 minutes, an actor walks on stage and gives a detailed explanation of the entire plot. This might have been delivered earlier.