‘They’re sickos’: How two of Dickens’ most notorious characters landed in Sydney

By Louise Rugendyke

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This will be the worst 30 seconds of your life, but I promise I’ll make it as quick as I can.”

Dr Jack Dawkins is holding a large knife above a man who is lying on a table with a crushed leg. The crowd in the operating theatre of the hospital is chanting “cut, cut, cut” and, well, I’ll let you imagine the rest.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster plays Dr Jack Dawkins, aka the Artful Dodger.

It’s a bloody re-introduction to one of Charles Dickens’ most famous characters, the Artful Dodger – pickpocket, traitor to Oliver Twist – now reimagined as a surgeon living a more respectable life in Port Victory in 1850s Australia. But Dawkins hasn’t quite left his past behind: Fagin, the master criminal who trained him in the art of thievery, is back.

It’s also the quick-fire opening sequence to Disney’s second locally produced scripted series, The Artful Dodger, an eight-part comedy-drama starring Brits Thomas Brodie-Sangster and David Thewlis as Dawkins and Fagin, who are aided and abetted by the governor’s daughter and aspiring surgeon Lady Belle (Maia Mitchell) and thwarted by Captain Gaines (Damon Herriman) and Darius Cracksworth (Tim Minchin). Rounding out the cast are Australian favourites Kym Gyngell, Susie Porter, Miranda Tapsell, Damien Garvey and Luke Carroll. It is less a stuffy BBC drama and more Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with added Wolfmother on the soundtrack.

David Thewlis plays Fagin, who conveniently escaped the noose at the end of Oliver Twist and has now landed in Australia.

“He’s trying to make himself into a better man,” says Brodie-Sangster of Dawkins. “Because he was an unloved boy. He’s an orphan who hasn’t really experienced love. The only thing that has come close to that is the character of Fagin … and that’s it. No one’s really ever given him the time of day. And he’s come to Australia, he has a chance to make a new life and Fagin comes in and potentially could completely disrupt that. That’s terrifying. So [Fagin] kind of pulls him back into his wicked ways. But he keeps trying to fight to be good.”

(If you’re thinking, hang on, didn’t Fagin die at the end of Oliver Twist, you’re not wrong. He was sent to the gallows, but seems to have made a quick recovery for this series).

Maia Mitchell stars as Lady Belle, the governor’s daughter who is an aspiring surgeon.

We’re on location in Parramatta, in a large white shed with a Tesla dealership across the road. But as soon as you step inside, it’s the Royal Hospital. There’s the operating theatre, set up in the round, with sawdust on the floor and bloodied bandages strewn about. Under the stairs is a room full of prosthetics – legs and arms dangling from the rafters, eyeballs goggling about. Another set of stairs leads to the mortuary. Then, if you turn left, it’s a corridor dotted with marble columns (the magic is broken somewhat once the columns are given a tap – it’s not marble, just the unmistakably hollow sound of plastic).

Brodie-Sangster is on a break from filming and sitting in the “professor’s office”, a stuffy study lined with books that looks like it belongs in a historical house instead of a shed. The 33-year-old Brit first came to attention in Love Actually (20 years ago, this year), as Sam, the lovestruck stepson of Liam Neeson, as well as roles in Game of Thrones and The Queen’s Gambit.

A young Thomas Brodie-Sangster in Love Actually with Liam Neeson, who played his stepfather.

He is tall and lean, with a flourish of blond hair, not at all like the “flat-browed, common-faced boy” that Dickens describes in Oliver Twist. Nor are his eyes “little, sharp, ugly”. He even indulges me – ever so slightly – when I jokingly ask if he still gets people running after him at airports in the style of Love Actually. “Depends on the airport, depends on what time of day it is.”

What does he think drives Dawkins, apart from escaping the noose?

“He does what he loves to do, and he does it for good reasons,” says Brodie-Sangster. “He enjoys helping people, saving people. He’s very much aware of his background and where he comes from. And he’s proud of that, so he wants to help people that need it the most. He’s also a very naughty boy, but he has morals in the right places. And I think that’s what’s important.”

Now, if the idea of Dawkins and Fagin meeting in Australia sounds far-fetched, astonishingly it’s partly based on truth. About 25 years ago, the show’s co-creator and co-executive producer David Taylor was on a motorbike ride around Tasmania. While in Richmond, just outside Hobart, he read a plaque on a door that said, “In this cell resided Ikey Solomon”, the master criminal who was sentenced to 14 years transportation to Van Diemen’s Land in 1831 for receiving stolen goods. His trial in London caused such a stir, and was covered extensively in pamphlets at the time, it’s thought that’s where Dickens drew his inspiration for Fagin.

The colonial-era Royal Hospital, where Jack Dawkins performs his operations, was built inside a disused shed in Parramatta.

“[Solomon] was an East End crook that ran a team of pickpockets,” says Taylor. “And we just thought that was a really cool idea that Fagin is buried in Hobart. And then just knowing at the end of Oliver Twist that Jack Dawkins gets transported [to Australia], we thought, imagine if Fagin and the Artful Dodger reunited in the colonies.

“But the story engine came when we stumbled across some articles from the 19th century that talked about street urchins being taken on as apprentices by surgeons. Surgery was a very different thing in the 19th century, it was more of a trade, it wasn’t a respected medical profession.

Damon Herriman (middle) plays Captain Gaines, who has a penchant for the noose and runs Port Victory.

“Then, when we’ve looked at the timeline of everything, when Twist was set, if Jack has reinvented himself as a surgeon in the colonies, 15 years later, and when we started chatting with Jim [James McNamara, co-creator and co-executive producer], there’s this 25-year period when modern medicine came to being – they discovered anaesthetic, they discovered germs, they discovered that surgery could be more than lopping off limbs.”

McNamara, it turns out, as well as being a screenwriter, has a PhD in surgeons in 19th-century literature. “It’s become very commercially relevant,” McNamara says, laughing. “I got a scholarship to go to Oxford after undergrad and I was just always really fascinated by doctors at that time and how they were represented in literature. So I was able to sit for four years and just read bloodstained Latin surgery books at the Bodleian Library, so that gave me an angle into breathing fresh life into Fagin and Dodger.”

That early life of crime works in Dawkins’ favour when it comes to surgery – his quick instincts and nimble fingers make him perfect for the job. And while Dawkins learnt his trade in the Navy, where he served in the Crimean War, for Brodie-Sangster it was Skype calls with a retired surgeon that helped him through each operation.

“The surgery scene basically looks like [in the script], ‘And they perform surgery’. That’s how it’s written,” he says. “And you go, OK, well, there’s a lot more to that. So I [had to work out] exactly the beats that are important [in the operation] and the rest of it is, I realised, elbows. That’s the effort. It’s all elbow acting. He’s a street guy. And he’s very overconfident. But in terms of actual surgery, no, I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know how to make it look good.”

Jack Dawkins and Lady Belle are a pair of “sickos” with a love of surgery, says Maia Mitchell.

Could he stitch someone up? “I’m not bad at sewing…”

And while the shadow of Dickens looms over The Artful Dodger, the show’s creators say they never felt beholden to him or the characters he created. Instead, it was a chance to reimagine two of his most complex characters and give them a fresh start.

“There’s something really delicious about the king and the Prince of Thieves in a land of convicts, where anyone can rise above their station if they’re capable enough,” says David Maher, another of the show’s co-creators and executive producers. “So there’s a real Australian emancipation story at the core of it. It’s not just a rigid class system in the colonies, someone like Jack, who started on the streets of London, was penniless and starving, can go into the Navy and a few short years later, become a surgeon on the other side of the world. And there’s a truth to that.”

That liberty also allowed them to create new characters from scratch, such as Lady Belle. Played by Australian actor Mitchell, Belle has more modern medical smarts than most of the blokes in Port Victory.

“She is this brilliant, independent, stubborn medical genius who is stuck in this gilded cage,” says Mitchell. “She’s massively ambitious, she’s outspoken but because of her position in life, and the time it is set, she has no opportunity to follow that through.

“So she’s deeply bored and dissatisfied, and Dodger brings her life back into her, through that kind of shared love of medicine. She’s ahead of her time in a lot of ways – she’s set in this time period, but her sensibility is of a modern woman.”

That sensibility also extends to Belle’s love life. She swats away potential suitors, preferring medicine to marriage. That’s until she meets Dawkins, of course.

“I think our first date is over the top of a cadaver,” she says. “They’re cutting it open and that’s, sort of, a romantic moment. They’re sickos, Belle and Jack, but I kind of love it.”

The Artful Dodger streams on Disney+ from November 29.

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