{"id":143959,"date":"2023-11-25T04:39:08","date_gmt":"2023-11-25T04:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theprojectsworld.com\/?p=143959"},"modified":"2023-11-25T04:39:08","modified_gmt":"2023-11-25T04:39:08","slug":"theyre-sickos-how-two-of-dickens-most-notorious-characters-landed-in-sydney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theprojectsworld.com\/lifestyle\/theyre-sickos-how-two-of-dickens-most-notorious-characters-landed-in-sydney\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018They\u2019re sickos\u2019: How two of Dickens\u2019 most notorious characters landed in Sydney"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Louise Rugendyke<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Save articles for later<\/h3>\n

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.<\/p>\n

This will be the worst 30 seconds of your life, but I promise I\u2019ll make it as quick as I can.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccut, cut, cut\u201d and, well, I\u2019ll let you imagine the rest.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Thomas Brodie-Sangster plays Dr Jack Dawkins, aka the Artful Dodger. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bloody re-introduction to one of Charles Dickens\u2019 most famous characters, the Artful Dodger \u2013 pickpocket, traitor to Oliver Twist \u2013 now reimagined as a surgeon living a more respectable life in Port Victory in 1850s Australia. But Dawkins hasn\u2019t quite left his past behind: Fagin, the master criminal who trained him in the art of thievery, is back.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also the quick-fire opening sequence to Disney\u2019s second locally produced scripted series, The Artful Dodger<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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<\/em>, with added Wolfmother on the soundtrack.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

David Thewlis plays Fagin, who conveniently escaped the noose at the end of Oliver Twist and has now landed in Australia.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s trying to make himself into a better man,\u201d says Brodie-Sangster of Dawkins. \u201cBecause he was an unloved boy. He\u2019s an orphan who hasn\u2019t really experienced love. The only thing that has come close to that is the character of Fagin \u2026 and that\u2019s it. No one\u2019s really ever given him the time of day. And he\u2019s come to Australia, he has a chance to make a new life and Fagin comes in and potentially could completely disrupt that. That\u2019s terrifying. So [Fagin] kind of pulls him back into his wicked ways. But he keeps trying to fight to be good.\u201d<\/p>\n

(If you\u2019re thinking, hang on, didn\u2019t Fagin die at the end of Oliver Twist<\/em>, you\u2019re not wrong. He was sent to the gallows, but seems to have made a quick recovery for this series).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Maia Mitchell stars as Lady Belle, the governor\u2019s daughter who is an aspiring surgeon.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re on location in Parramatta, in a large white shed with a Tesla dealership across the road. But as soon as you step inside, it\u2019s the Royal Hospital. There\u2019s 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 \u2013 legs and arms dangling from the rafters, eyeballs goggling about. Another set of stairs leads to the mortuary. Then, if you turn left, it\u2019s a corridor dotted with marble columns (the magic is broken somewhat once the columns are given a tap \u2013 it\u2019s not marble, just the unmistakably hollow sound of plastic).<\/p>\n

Brodie-Sangster is on a break from filming and sitting in the \u201cprofessor\u2019s office\u201d, 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<\/em> (20 years ago, this year), as Sam, the lovestruck stepson of Liam Neeson, as well as roles in Game of Thrones<\/em> and The Queen\u2019s Gambit<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A young Thomas Brodie-Sangster in Love Actually with Liam Neeson, who played his stepfather.<\/span><\/p>\n

He is tall and lean, with a flourish of blond hair, not at all like the \u201cflat-browed, common-faced boy\u201d that Dickens describes in Oliver Twist<\/em>. Nor are his eyes \u201clittle, sharp, ugly\u201d. He even indulges me \u2013 ever so slightly \u2013 when I jokingly ask if he still gets people running after him at airports in the style of Love Actually<\/em>. \u201cDepends on the airport, depends on what time of day it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does he think drives Dawkins, apart from escaping the noose?<\/p>\n

\u201cHe does what he loves to do, and he does it for good reasons,\u201d says Brodie-Sangster. \u201cHe enjoys helping people, saving people. He\u2019s very much aware of his background and where he comes from. And he\u2019s proud of that, so he wants to help people that need it the most. He\u2019s also a very naughty boy, but he has morals in the right places. And I think that\u2019s what\u2019s important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, if the idea of Dawkins and Fagin meeting in Australia sounds far-fetched, astonishingly it\u2019s partly based on truth. About 25 years ago, the show\u2019s 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, \u201cIn this cell resided Ikey Solomon\u201d, the master criminal who was sentenced to 14 years transportation to Van Diemen\u2019s 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\u2019s thought that\u2019s where Dickens drew his inspiration for Fagin.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The colonial-era Royal Hospital, where Jack Dawkins performs his operations, was built inside a disused shed in Parramatta.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[Solomon] was an East End crook that ran a team of pickpockets,\u201d says Taylor. \u201cAnd 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<\/em> that Jack Dawkins gets transported [to Australia], we thought, imagine if Fagin and the Artful Dodger reunited in the colonies.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut 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\u2019t a respected medical profession.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Damon Herriman (middle) plays Captain Gaines, who has a penchant for the noose and runs Port Victory.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThen, when we\u2019ve looked at the timeline of everything, when Twist<\/em> 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\u2019s this 25-year period when modern medicine came to being \u2013 they discovered anaesthetic, they discovered germs, they discovered that surgery could be more than lopping off limbs.\u201d<\/p>\n

McNamara, it turns out, as well as being a screenwriter, has a PhD in surgeons in 19th-century literature. \u201cIt\u2019s become very commercially relevant,\u201d McNamara says, laughing. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

That early life of crime works in Dawkins\u2019 favour when it comes to surgery \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe surgery scene basically looks like [in the script], \u2018And they perform surgery\u2019. That\u2019s how it\u2019s written,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd you go, OK, well, there\u2019s 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\u2019s the effort. It\u2019s all elbow acting. He\u2019s a street guy. And he\u2019s very overconfident. But in terms of actual surgery, no, I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing. I just know how to make it look good.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jack Dawkins and Lady Belle are a pair of \u201csickos\u201d with a love of surgery, says Maia Mitchell. <\/span><\/p>\n

Could he stitch someone up? \u201cI\u2019m not bad at sewing\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

And while the shadow of Dickens looms over The Artful Dodger<\/em>, the show\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s 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\u2019re capable enough,\u201d says David Maher, another of the show\u2019s co-creators and executive producers. \u201cSo there\u2019s a real Australian emancipation story at the core of it. It\u2019s 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\u2019s a truth to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is this brilliant, independent, stubborn medical genius who is stuck in this gilded cage,\u201d says Mitchell. \u201cShe\u2019s massively ambitious, she\u2019s outspoken but because of her position in life, and the time it is set, she has no opportunity to follow that through.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo she\u2019s deeply bored and dissatisfied, and Dodger brings her life back into her, through that kind of shared love of medicine. She\u2019s ahead of her time in a lot of ways \u2013 she\u2019s set in this time period, but her sensibility is of a modern woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

That sensibility also extends to Belle\u2019s love life. She swats away potential suitors, preferring medicine to marriage. That\u2019s until she meets Dawkins, of course.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think our first date is over the top of a cadaver,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re cutting it open and that\u2019s, sort of, a romantic moment. They\u2019re sickos, Belle and Jack, but I kind of love it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Artful Dodger<\/em> streams on Disney+ from November 29.
<\/strong><\/p>\n

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees.<\/i><\/b> Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday<\/i><\/b>.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

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