Theatre / Jack Maggs. At The Playhouse, until December 7. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

Jack Maggs needs some sorting out by an audience.

It’s an adaptation by Samuel Adamson of Peter Carey’s novel of the same name which is itself  a reaction to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Under Geordie Brookman’s swiftly energetic direction and with lavishly inventive design by Ailsa Paterson and Nigel Leving’s supportive lighting a parallel universe to that novel comes alive.

There’s still a convict returned and seeking the boy who he saw as a son but there’s also a writer who bears quite a resemblance to Dickens.

Mark Saturno is a deep-voiced menacing presence as Maggs and James Smith convincingly mendacious and charming as the Dickens figure Tobias Oates. No Pip or Miss Havisham or Estella but Ahunim Abebe, Jacqy Phillips, Rachel Burke, Dale March, Jelena Nicdao and Nathan O’Keefe are kept very busy playing a range of fascinating characters. Abebe gives real presence to narrator Mercy Larkin with Phillips having a particular dignity and humour at the end as Old Mercy.

A State Theatre Company South Australia production, it all takes a while to rumble to a conclusion but there’s a definite statement about the early creation of one kind of Australian identity born out of the convict system. A stroppy kind of freedom emerges in Maggs, agin the British Isles, blind to anything indigenous, arising from the cruelty of the convict system.

I wonder what my third and fourth fleet convict ancestors would have to say about all that.

Great expectations for Dickens-with-a-difference show