The youngsters in Oliver! are paid a pittance, but is the opportunity priceless?

A scene from Oliver!
Pocket-pickers ... Rowan Atkinson's Fagin and the young stars of Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Oliver! is set in a Victorian workhouse, and cynics might well wonder if conditions have improved all that much in the West End. Producer Cameron Mackintosh has given Lionel Bart's musical its biggest and most spectacular staging yet: "This is going to be the teeming London that Dickens knew," he said before the show opened. "There are going to be twice as many children on stage as there were at the Palladium. Drury Lane demands drama and spectacle."

But this has been achieved partly by paring down the costs. As we learned from the Observer: "The ragged workhouse inmates who open the musical with Food, Glorious Food! are believed to be earning less than £20 a night". These kids may be getting the experience of a lifetime by appearing in a hit West End show, but it is the parents who are paying for the privilege, several times over: not just in the journeys they are making as unpaid chauffeurs, but also for hotel expenses if they're coming from outside London. Then there's the cost of tickets for friends and family – with 150 kids in the show (three teams of 50), an awful lot of seats are going to be shifted this way.

Mind you, the earnings of Oliver!'s young chorus are still generous compared with the situation at Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, running at the Adelphi, where the onstage choir of youngsters isn't paid at all. The producers make a payment to the performers' theatre school and a donation to Children in Need instead. So the investment, such as it is, is in their education. But as one parent complained to the Mail on Sunday: "There's a lot of work involved. My daughter doesn't get back until 11.30pm, so it's a very long day. It doesn't matter so much during the summer holidays but they've had to take time off school and it was quite difficult."

Fee levels for adult actors are regulated by agreements between managements and Equity, the actors' union. However, kids are not eligible for Equity membership, so the union can only make recommendations. They currently suggest that kids should be paid half the minimum fee of an adult actor.

For the management, of course, the costs of employing children are high in other ways – they are legally obliged to provide armies of chaperones; plus, the constant rotation of casts and the need to keep renewing them, owing to the limited amount of time the children are allowed to work, is a logistical nightmare. But some shows have been generous: the producers of Billy Elliot, for example, pay above the suggested minimum.

Of course a job isn't just about your salary. For successful child actors, a professional career might await them: look at Jamie Bell, who has gone from playing the title role in the film version of Billy Elliot to a successful adult career. Then there's Phil Collins, an Artful Dodger in the 1964 production of Oliver! in the West End. On the other hand, Mark Lester – who played the title character of Oliver! in the 1968 film – carried on acting for a bit but ended up becoming an osteopath.

The kids currently getting a taste of the action in Oliver! may yet have lessons to learn about the true perils of a showbiz career.