Callow conjures a Carol worthy of Dickens
Christmas without Dickens is like the Alps without snow – unthinkable. With one novella – first published in 1843 – he beautifully encapsulated all the happiness and sadness of the festive season, a time of rejuvenating possibility mingled with a dread sense of reckoning. His tale of unbounded miserliness reined in and redeemed is like a perfectly wrapped gift that must be passed on, from generation to generation, for as long as there is Yuletide wassailing and concerted heartiness to cheer us through the bleak midwinter.
A Christmas Carol was the first of Dickens’s public readings – and it was his last on March 15 1870. The event was “overpoweringly emotional”, according to Simon Callow in his fine, theatrically oriented biography of the man. We can but guess what he was like. Perhaps Callow, again reviving his own acclaimed solo abridged version of the tale, is as close as we can get.
The Four Weddings and a Funeral actor is a more than an actor – he’s personality, inspiring in his commitment to his intellectual passions. With a voice as fruity as a mince-pie, and a manner as warming as a hearthside, he could almost be from a bygone age. He’s just what’s needed.
I have to confess that my inner Ebenezer recoiled at how much you have to spend to obtain 70 minutes in his company. The top-price ticket to see this on Christmas Eve is £55 – about 78p a minute. And does this purchase you all the trimmings? Is the show a feast for the eyes? Well, hardly. The aesthetic is little grander than a trestle-table at a Victorian workhouse: stacks of old chairs which Callow deploys as the scene demands; there are evocative flurries of fake-snow; the odd apparition appearing behind a subtly and suggestively moved gauze screen. Bah, humbug!
And yet, of course, it’s precisely that instinct – to tot up the cost, to miss the intrinsic value – that the story exposes as entirely self-defeating. Callow’s account of the tale – much filleted, and even reworded at points – is greater than the sum of its parts. It works magic through the snow-like accretion of details. Initially it’s just a man talking. And then, almost without our realising it, thanks to alterations of accent and demeanour, little physicalised moments, our imagination has been harnessed, and the vanished world of Dickens’s London rears up in our mind’s eye – just as palpably as the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future present themselves to Scrooge.
We walk with this shrivelled-up soul through a dark smog, as Callow takes tentative steps across the stage. We hear the clock tick, the bells in Scrooge’s gloomy house tinkle madly, the haunting sound of carollers singing
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. A switch from warm to cold lighting, and we’re plunged from remembered gaiety back to mortal fear. A small stool, a pained grimace and twisted way of talking – and there’s ailing Tiny Tim. Callow’s shadow – thrown large and forbidding behind him – conjures the gigantic hulk of the spirit of Christmas Present.
The only sadness is that it is all over so soon. Just like Christmas.
Until Jan 7. Tickets: 020 7836 8463; artstheatrewestend.co.uk