FESTIVE JOLLITY TO CHEER UP SCROOGE
A Christmas Carol (Nottingham Playhouse) Verdict: Cheer trumps chills ★★★☆☆
THE Christmas Carol season has started early... very early. First, this one adapted from Dickens’s story by Mark Gatiss, who also plays Jacob Marley opposite Nicholas Farrell as Scrooge.
Still to come, we have the Old Vic’s latest take, this time with Stephen Mangan playing the old misery; and there will no doubt be many more Ebenezers bah humbug-ing their way out of the woodwork before December 25.
Gatiss has sought to focus on the ghoulishness of the tale, which he may be alone in believing has been ‘undervalued’ as a ghost story. And yet the result is no more ghostly than normal. Apart from showing Scrooge’s famously dead associate Marley briefly alive, the main innovation is the Ghost of Christmas Past looking like a rugby prop forward in a lacy white smock.
As the Ghost of Christmas Present, booming Joe Shire may be a little more forbidding than usual. But the last ghost is a standard-issue grim reaper.
Adam Penfold’s production lays on Hammer Horror gimmicks including spectral video projections and flying sheets. But you’ve got your work cut out to make a tale as familiar as this seem creepy. So Paul Wills’s set design wisely packs in plenty of déjà vu. He conjures Scrooge’s office with towers of dusty filing cabinets and video projections of smoking chimneys.
Gatiss also pops up in League Of Gentlemen mode with multiple other turns. Farrell makes a sternly dyspeptic Scrooge, but he’s light on his feet, too; capable of a sprightly jig when he finally uncorks his seasonal jollity.
Carols at the end ensure the evening is more about Christmas cheer than ghoulish chills. But you may prefer to hold out for its run at London’s Alexandra Palace to enjoy as a midwinter warmer.
christmascarolonstage.co.uk.