Theatre Paul Bailey
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
There have been scores of conventional stage adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but Jack Thorne’s, in Matthew Warchus’s luminously beautiful production at the Old Vic, is decidedly not one of them.
It takes liberties that might offend purists, offering certain psychological explanations for Ebenezer Scrooge’s meanness of spirit and tightness with money. Thorne is aware of the fact that Dickens’s childhood was scarred by his father’s inability to pay his debts, which led to John Dickens being arrested and consigned to the Marshalsea, the notorious debtors’ prison.
Ebenezer’s father, as presented by Thorne, is a hard taskmaster, forever challenging his son to make his way in the world while bringing about the family’s financial ruin.
Scrooge Junior takes his revenge by amassing a fortune as a moneylender and debt collector; Dickens took his, you might say, via a more capacious and imaginative route, becoming in the process one of the foremost chroniclers of human folly in the whole of literature.
With the exception of the newly dead Jacob Marley – a fearsome, dark presence clankingly enchained for eternity – the ghosts here are women. They enter the snarling skinflint’s consciousness in the last hours of Christmas Eve, impressing upon him the virtues he abandoned when his father forced him into an apprenticeship at an early age (like the one the young Dickens had to endure in the blacking factory). They remind him that wealth as an end in itself destroys society by negating kindness and generosity. They cause him to recall the lost love of his blighted life, Belle Fezziwig, who once returned his affection before he went into business with Marley. The Ghost of Christmas Present tells him that she herself is not entirely happy, because her parents didn’t christen her Brenda.
Rob Howell, the designer, makes use of the entire auditorium. There is a walkway through the stalls that leads to the main acting area, behind which there are several rows of seats. The actors pop up everywhere, often within touching distance.
The composer and arranger Christopher Nightingale has chosen twelve carols to lighten the gloom that surrounds the heartless Scrooge and to celebrate the arrival of the revivified Ebenezer. Some of these – Silent Night,
in particular – are played on handbells, the sound of which is eerily moving.
Rhys Ifans, who was such a splendidly bolshie Fool to Glenda Jackson’s magisterial Lear, plays Scrooge. His Ebenezer is a tormented soul, unacquainted at the outset with such everyday concerns as personal hygiene. He has let himself go, quite literally. His hair looks as if it’s in a permanent tizzy. He is barely civil to his clerk, Bob Cratchit (John Dagleish), whom he expects to honour his every demand without question. Then, as the play progresses, he casts off the Scrooge that people fear and keep their distance from and becomes, step by painful step, a man on the dizzying verge of goodness.
I have witnessed few moments in the theatre as touching and delightful as the moment of this Scrooge’s transformation, which inspired the audience to gratified applause. Ifans’s suddenly beaming Ebenezer is a man genuinely surprised by the happiness he feels at parting with his money and rejoining the human race. He simply can’t believe it’s happening to him. This is a masterly performance that combines real pathos with comic bravura of a high order. It isn’t remotely sentimental, but it is affecting in a way that perfectly suits Jack Thorne’s justifiably clever conception.
What is especially impressive about this latest version of A Christmas Carol is the manner in which it confronts mortality. Scrooge’s reawakening constitutes the best kind of second childhood, with its reminder that it can never be too late to enjoy the diverse company of others, young and old.
At the Old Vic, members of the audience are invited to participate in the banquet Scrooge prepares for the
Cratchits. I have to say that this occasional, critical Scrooge enjoyed the show immensely, as did the many children and teenagers sitting near and above me. Everyone involved deserves to be warmly congratulated on a remarkable achievement.