If Scrooge had lived in Notting Hill
A Christmas Carol Old Vic
Christmas Carols are proving ten a penny this festive season. A fresh take looms at the RSC in Stratford next week; Scrooge the Musical
has just opened in Leicester; and next month there’s a chance to roam around Windsor Castle, no less, in an immersive production (let royal wedding hysteria commence!). Is this a mere coincidence or a telling facet of our belt-tightened times? Few stories do more to ponder the moral cost of hoarding wealth while also contemplating the spectre of debt.
Now, we’re getting yet another spin on the yarn, courtesy of Jack Thorne – riding high, now and perhaps forever, on the success of Harry Potter and the
Cursed Child. The star billing, though, goes to Rhys Ifans, who’s playing Dickens’s incorrigible (but ultimately redeemed) miser Ebenezer Scrooge and is returning to the Old Vic after appearing here last year as the Fool in King Lear.
Millions will still think fondly of the 50-year-old actor thanks to his name-making turn as the slobby Spike, uncouth housemate to Hugh Grant’s refined book-seller in Notting
Hill. And if they need any prompting to revisit that venerated Britflick, Matthew Warchus’s stylish production should do the trick. It’s as if the show is haunted by the ghost of Richard Curtis films past: there’s not one but two showers of fake (soapy) snow drifting down, and such a warm glow generated by its regular outbreaks of wassailing that it could serve as a rival source of energy to renewables.
This is an intensely melodious reading of the classic tale – book-ended by the cast, in spotless period attire, cheerily filling the air with the angelic sound of chiming hand-bells. Those who love a shortcut to enchantment will be smitten but what’s frustratingly elusive is a sense of engulfing dread.
Dickens – a chunk of whose establishing narration is parsimoniously included, but alas chorused by all and sundry, rendering it barely comprehensible – was colliding the shaming murk of industrial London with a dark, supernatural mystery to prick the consciences of the affluent classes.
When he wrote, “The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that… the houses opposite were mere phantoms”, he was looking at this netherworld with a social reformer’s zeal. In Warchus’s production, it’s as if the Clean Air Act is already in force (I’ve seen productions of Oliver! with more grit). Thorne has also scampishly meddled about with the narrative to add greater emphasis on Ebenezer’s brutish father as the source of his psychological wounds and amplified the potential of his spurned (but still forgiving) sweetheart Belle to heal them. An odd creative decision here shows the three visiting spirits in female guises, pushing prams to bizarre and distinctly unthreatening effect. It’s therefore left to Ifans to do a lot of the heavy lifting required to convey the story’s perturbing emotional reality.
Bestriding a raised cruciform stage that reminds you this tale has probably done more Christian good than countless pulpit sermons, he’s a tousled-haired delight, surprisingly spry yet capable of freezing like a startled rabbit at the unwanted intrusions. Hunched, in fraying frock-coat, and hugging his deposit-boxes to him with perverse tenderness, he’s got a good growl on him but we know, deep down, that his bark is worse than his bite. I was genuinely moved by the sight of him shaking hands with Tiny Tim, as if rediscovering the power of camaraderie. But overall, did I part company with this production as firm friends? Bah, humbug, nah!