Spooky Scrooge is a Christmas plum

YET another Scrooge! Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre is one of several to have chosen A Christmas Carol for its December show.

The RSC has come up with an olde worlde look, broadly satisfying despite a few fussy additions by adaptor David Edgar.

Phil Davis gives us a properly crotchety critter as mean Ebenezer. His Scrooge is greyhaired, tssking, tight in his little sealed world. There is less of the jokey surrealism found in the London Old Vic’s current version.

Designer Stephen Brimson Lewis’s backdrop depicts a Victorian tenement block, flecked by falling snow. Scrooge’s fourposter bed rises midstage and levitates further to show us ghostly souls tormented in Hell.

Unlike the Old Vic, director Rachel Kavanaugh is here prepared to haunt her audience.

A couple of spectral touches, not least some ingenious business with a doorknocker and the dead Marley, may give meeker spectators the collywobbles. Quite right, too. Scrooge should be alarmed by the ghosts who visit him, as should we.

Tiny Tim (played on opening night by Jude Muir) is an orthodox, crutchwielding heartbreaker. John Hodgkinson’s Fezziwig has an interesting vulnerability, making him all the more loveable.

A large cast gives a good idea of a wide community — some minor characters are afforded zippy names such as ‘Mrs Snapchat’ and ‘Herr Uber’.

Add the usual RSC veneer of artful music, sumptuous backwall images and a lighting design that creates a silveredged entrance for Want and Ignorance, and you leave with a sense of assiduous professionalism.

The show is made longer than necessary by Mr Edgar inserting an opening scene of Dickens and his editor discussing Victorian child poverty.

I could have done without such clumsy preachifying. But otherwise, this is a Christmas plum.

A Christmas Carol (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) Verdict: Olde Worlde Dickens