WHAT THE DICKENS!
Windsor Castle dazzles as a theatrical backdrop — a shame Scrooge & co are left in the shade . . .
CHRISTMAS as we know it — with the trees, cards, carols and charity — was strongly shaped by two 19th-century figures: Charles Dickens and Prince Albert.
It was therefore a neat idea of the Royal Collection Trust to stage a production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at Windsor Castle, where Queen Victoria and Albert were photographed at their Christmas tree in 1848 by Illustrated London News.
That image inspired the British middle classes to copy the royal couple.
Thus did your critic find himself in Windsor Castle’s St George’s Hall one night this week, gawping at an enormous Christmas tree while singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing with Mr Ebenezer Scrooge.
What a tree! It was as high as a two-storey house and topped by a child-sized angel. Scrooge (Edward Halsted) and his fellow performers from the Watch Your Head company in their period costumes stood among us and in a minstrels’ gallery as we all warbled away, transported to Victorian times.
Well, that was the idea. Artistically, the show was a mixed success. The direction was always going to struggle to match the setting.
Most of the play was enacted in the round in the castle’s Waterloo Chamber, a high-ceilinged barn with difficult acoustics. The Waterloo Chamber is used for state gatherings and is where the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret acted in am-dram productions at Windsor during the war.
Hefty portaits of monarchs and generals and politicians stare down from the walls. That chill running down your spine was not the Ghost of Christmas Past but the basilisk stare of Frederick William, early 19th-century Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, an odd-looking cove.
Add monumental balconies, suits of armour, displays of battle axes and pikestaffs, tall double-doors leading to palatial corridors, and a suggestion of moonlight through the clerestory windows, and there was no doubting the sense of history.
TO REACH the chamber we had walked up a narrow gravel path with views of the darkened castle keep and, above, the floodlit Round Tower. Actors — beggars, match sellers, musicians and gentry — fluttered round us. Could the production utilise all this for dramatic ends?
The opening monologue by Marley (John Kay Steel) was delivered with good poise but the echo made his lines indistinct, particularly when his back was turned.
In a cast of just eight, six of the actors take multiple roles which, even with aggressive editing of the plot, pushes credibility.
The best moments came with the use of the balconies and when the lighting isolated individual characters.
Things turned peculiar when a white sheet was brought on stage to act as some sort of signifier (its purpose eluded me). One of the ghosts was symbolised by giant vegetables made of plastic.
I caught the eye of a fulllength George III opposite me and he looked as baffled as the rest of us. Never mind. Even if the theatre is patchy, Windsor Castle is a wonderfully dramatic place.
ONE of Victor Hugo’s darker tales has been turned into a musical, The Grinning Man. The Hugo original was The Man Who Laughs, about a young man whose mouth was so mutilated in boyhood that he seemed always to be amused. A terrible fate.
FIRST seen at the Bristol Old Vic, this production is done with Brechtian cleverness but is hard to love. The auditorium has been done up to resemble a circus.
We are in 17th-century London, in the company of the ailing king’s favourite clown (Julian Bleach).
Disfigured Grinpayne (Louis Maskell) wishes he could be avenged on the person who slit his mouth into a melon slice when he was little. But an old man who took him in as a boy has given him a medical potion which robs him of memory.
The story could be done as exaggerated melodrama, comprising the English royal family, court intrigues and Grinpayne’s life as a fairground freak show exhibit.
Director Tom Morris goes instead for knowing selfmockery. He accentuates the other-worldliness of the saga, both by use of puppets and a few post-modern asides (some of the language is 21stcentury coarse).
Puppets usually leave me cold but one of a kindly wolf here is particularly well done. The wolf helps Grinpayne to defy his enemies and stay loyal to his blind girlfriend (Sanne Den Besten).
Tim Phillips and Marc Teitler’s breezy music is similarly interesting, a couple of the songs succeeding despite the aversion to sentimentality. Mr Maskell has a pleasant seltzer of a voice.
The politics of Hugo’s story, attacking the monarchy, is largely lost, although there was a laugh for a line which expressed incredulity about Lords being paid by the state.
Much though I admired the ingenuity of its staging, I never really warmed to The Grinning Man.