A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Ghostly fable meets the power of interpretive dance. What the Dickens?
RELEASED 4 DECEMBER PG | 96 minutes
Directors David Morris, Jacqui Morris
Cast Simon Russell Beale,
Carey Mulligan, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya
Given the groaning weight of adaptations of A Christmas Carol over the decades, it’s become harder and harder to find a fresh and radical way of putting Charles Dickens’s much-loved story on the screen – though that doesn’t stop people trying. Steven Knight’s version last year offered up an adult-skewed social-realist take.
This latest adaptation, from siblings Jacqui and David Morris, goes the other way, taking the story back to its family viewing roots and making a selling point of its theatrical, minimalist staging. Though the cast list pops with A-list names, they’re not actually visible in the film. Instead, dancers voicelessly perform the roles, as actors speak the dialogue. So while Simon Russell Beale provides the voice of Scrooge, physically he’s played by dancers Michael Nunn (old Ebenezer) and Jakub Franasowicz (young Ebenezer).
It takes some getting used to, as do the stylised sets (the film’s action takes place in the mind of a little Victorian girl, while she’s being told the story by her grandmother), but if you love A Christmas Carol and can’t stomach the 103rd rewatch of Alastair Sim or Patrick Stewart, then this is just what the big man in red ordered.
The earliest known film adaptation of the book is Scrooge, Or Marley’s Ghost, a sixminute silent movie from 1901.