A CHRISTMAS CAROL (PG)
★★★ ★★
EXPRESSIVE movement and spoken narration are exceedingly happy bedfellows in Jacqui Morris and David Morris’ dance drama adaptation of Charles Dickens’ seasonal fable, which hopes to spread much-needed festive cheer as cinemas reopen in Tiers 1 and 2.
A young girl called Emily (Thea Achillea) nestles in the arms of her parents (Richard Cotton, Georgina Sutcliffe) to watch her older siblings, Alice (Ruby
McMillan-Wilson) and Peter (Oliver John Lock), perform Dickens’ seasonal fable on a paper theatre stage with narration from their grandmother (Sian Phillips).
Money lender Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Nunn, voiced by Simon Russell Beale) rejects an invitation to Christmas dinner from his kind-hearted nephew Fred (Simone Donalti, voiced by Tom Stourton) and returns home where the ghost of his late partner, Marley (Russell Maliphant, voiced by Andy Serkis), heralds the arrival of three spectres – The
Ghost Of Christmas Past (Dana Maliphant, voiced by Leslie Caron); the Ghost Of Christmas Present (Mikey Boateng, voiced by Daniel Kaluuya) and the Spirit Of Yet To Come.
The latter reveals the sobering fortunes of Scrooge’s underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit (Karl Fagerlund Brekke, voiced by Martin Freeman), his wife (Hannah Kidd, voiced by Lorraine Ashbourne) and their desperately ill youngest child, Tiny Tim (Danil Golovam, voiced by Archie Durrant).
Scrooge resolves to learn the “latent moral for his own improvement”.
A Christmas Carol employs simple but effective visuals to meld real and phantasmagorical elements without losing sight of the evergreen moral lesson that facilitates Scrooge’s rebirth.
In selected cinemas.