DISNEY+ – ON DEMAND – SERIES
Jack Dawkins was left in 1834, the year of the publication ofOliver Twist, on the threshold of adolescence and deportation to Australia. The future of the Rusé matois or the Fox, according to the translations ofOliver Twist, The Artful Dodger in the original version, a virtuoso pickpocket in the service of the terrible Fagin – cruel leader of a gang of juvenile delinquents to whom the kind Oliver had joined – seemed very compromised.
Two centuries later, or thereabouts, Jack Dawkins reappears, in Australia, as His Majesty’s justice intended him to do, but in the exercise of a new profession which requires as much dexterity as the old one, while benefiting from the consideration of the social body. In this impertinent variation on a motif by Charles Dickens, the creators of Fox. Prince of Thieves have not retained from the author of David Copperfield as his horror for the injustices of Victorian society, throwing aside his prudishness and his propensity for melodramatic paroxysms.
Once past the episode which presents young Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a gifted and penniless practitioner, who survives thanks to gambling, at the risk of incurring the fury of the king of the local underworld, the series moves away from these clichés to have fun with Dickens’s characters, throwing them into the savagery of an Australia which is above all a penal colony.
Funny trickster
This sudden influx of energy is due to the arrival of Fagin, to whom a bewigged magistrate offered a one-way ticket to the Antipodes. The character is usually presented as a monster, and his portrait – in Dickens’ novel, who later repented of it, and in David Lean’s film (1948, Alec Guinness played the role) – bathed in nauseating anti-Semitic overtones. Here, the crossing did him good. Taken in charge by David Thewlis (Professor Lupine at Hogwarts), Fagin is a funny trickster. Thewlis finds in Thomas Brodie-Sangster an ideal partner, a skillful showcase for the excesses of a mutt who seems to have emerged from the grand guignol.
The surgical sequences add to the cruelty of the crimes and punishments. Disney+ displays a notice at the entrance to each episode warning that the characters use tobacco, without saying anything about these bloody amputations which would have found their place in The Knick, by Steven Soderbergh. Fortunately, Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), the governor’s daughter, a surgeon hindered by her status as a woman and object of the flame of the ci-devant pocket-saver, imposes the use of ether after a few episodes; in defiance, probably, of the history of Australian medicine.
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