Lionel Bart [Allan Warren]

SIR Cameron Mack­intosh’s production of Oliver! at the Gielgud Theatre has been extended to spring 2026 with additional Sunday matinées. One five-star review called it “a stunning reinvention, stuffed with brilliant performances and hit songs every five minutes. What a way to start the year.”

The musical was written by the cockney songsmith Lionel Bart, who was a composer but couldn’t read music and late of the Unity Theatre in Mornington Crescent, Camden.

Bart was born Lionel Begleiter, youngest of seven children of Jewish Eastenders, in 1930. His father was a tailor and Lionel had a brother who was killed in the Spanish Civil War, fighting on the Republican side.

Bart did his National Service in the RAF with John Gorman of the Banners Bright fame.

After National Service they started a printing firm in Hackney, G&B Arts, which became a successful silkscreen printers. He and Gorman became very political and joined the Communist Party.

He then joined Unity Theatre, a left-wing theatre company, and wrote the lyrics for an agitprop Cinderella. This was the start of his career in the theatre, and he changed his name to that of the famous London hospital.

It is claimed in The Story of Unity Theatre by Colin Chambers that he was nurtured by many people there and went on to contribute to three more shows before collaborating with Frank Norman at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, via Unity contacts on Fings Ain’t Wot They Used to Be. It then ran for two years in the West End.

In 1958 he wrote Wally Pone, loosely based on Ben Jonson’s Volpone, King of the Underworld.

This was his first musical for Unity Theatre. It was a take-off of a conman unmasked and ran for eight weeks.

He went on to compose songs for stars and always wrote with a performer in mind. Cliff Richard’s Living Doll was allegedly written in 10 minutes.

At the Theatre Royal, Bart came under the stewardship of Joan Littlewood and in 1960 virtually every theatre management turned down Oliver!, which was based on the Charles Dickens novel, because they thought it too morbid a subject.

The songs he wrote for early British rockers, such as Tommy Steele (Rock With the Cavemen and Little White Bull), along with Fings, and Lock Up Your Daughters were a success and helped him to finance Oliver! himself. Oliver! was followed by Blitz and Maggie May.

To finance a new musical, Twang, based on Robin Hood of Sherwood, with Barbara Windsor, he signed away all rights to Oliver!

He estimated years later, when he was skint, that he would have been £100million better off if he hadn’t.

Twang flopped badly at an estimated loss of £1million and he filed for bankruptcy in 1972. The Guardian obituary said of him: “Small, generous, unpredictable, and signed away the rights to all his works.”

In 1986, Bart received a special Ivor Novello Award for lifetime achievement. The impresario Cameron Mackintosh, who owned half the rights, gave him a share of production royalties.

In the late 1970s his heavy drinking brought on diabetes. He stopped drinking but a third of his liver was destroyed. He died in 1999, aged 68, after suffering from cancer for six months.

He enjoyed recognition but apparently never forgot the welcome he received when visiting the rehearsal rooms of the National Theatre in greyest Islington.