Of mince pies and minced spies
A refreshing take on a Dickens classic, dark dealings in Elizabethan England and a news anchorman who finally flips at a mad world
Theatre critic Michael Billington considers an unusual take on Dickens’s Christmas classic and dark Elizabethan dealings
HALF the theatres in the land seem to be staging A Christmas Carol, but I doubt if we’ll see a version as invigorating as the one at London’s Old Vic. Both Jack Thorne’s adaptation and Matthew Warchus’s production capture the dual aspects of a work that G. K. Chesterton memorably called ‘an enjoyable nightmare’. It’s an evening of mince pies and carols, but one that conveys the strange, hallucinatory nature of Scrooge’s nocturnal experience.
Some radical decisions have been taken. Designer Rob Howell has reconfigured the space so that a long, peninsular stage threads its way through the stalls and brings us closer to the action and he’s not been afraid to tinker with Dickens’s plot.
Scrooge is still visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future—all women here— but great pains have been taken to explain the source of his misanthropy. He’s the victim of a drunken, debt-ridden father who instills in him a fear of being penniless, which leads him to put loot before love and reject a romance with Mr Fezziwig’s daughter.
Even the ending has been altered as if to answer the legitimate question raised by John Sutherland as to how on earth the Cratchits manage to cook a vast turkey that arrives late on Christmas Day.
The great thing is that this version preserves the spirit of Dickens’s hardy perennial. The most inspired decision is to get composer Christopher Nightingale to rearrange traditional carols —everything from God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen to In The Bleak Midwinter—which the cast play on handbells. There’s a sense of joy as snow cascades from the roof and the audience is roped in to ferry the fruit and veg that will adorn the climactic Christmas dinner. However, we’re never allowed to forget that charity and hope are counterpointed by Dickens’s anger at the twin evils of ignorance and want.
Rhys Ifans is an excellent Scrooge. He has the right lean and hungry look and unkempt, strawcoloured hair. He reminds us of Scrooge’s wasted potential and of how an obsession with money turned him into a self-hating skinflint. If we’re moved to tears— and many people were—it’s because we feel his long-suppressed capacity for love has finally been released. The overall result is a production that, to quote Chesterton again, has all the ‘rowdy benediction’ of Dickens’s original.
There’s a very different ambience to Anders Lustgarten’s The Secret Theatre at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse: as the focus is on the surveillance network at the Court of Elizabeth I and the tortures inflicted on double agents, you might say that we’re in a world of minced spies. However, Mr Lustgarten’s point, in this vivid, disturbing play, is clear: that the climate of fear and panic created by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, in his determination to suppress Catholic plots is echoed in today’s security-obsessed society.
Mr Lustgarten sometimes bends history to his purpose: we see Walsingham putting the Jesuit priest Robert Southwell to the rack even though the latter evaded arrest until after the spymaster’s death and I couldn’t quite believe in the portrait of Elizabeth (played by Tara Fitzgerald) as a foul-mouthed termagant.
However, this is a deeply political play that takes its title from John le Carré’s observation that ‘espionage is the secret theatre of our society’ and that warns against the danger of giving unchecked power to its prosecutors. The piece is thunderingly well directed by Matthew Dunster, who exploits the candlelit interior of the theatre to show that spying is a dark trade.
I’d offer a belated recommendation to Network at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre. The show is booked to the hilt, but it’s worth recording the achievement of everyone in bringing Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film script to the stage.
Movie buffs will recall that this is the tale of a TV news anchorman
who suffers a breakdown on screen and turns into a raging prophet. His cry of ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more’ has acquired an unnerving topicality by showing how power can be achieved by tapping into popular anger.
The director, Ivo van Hove, and his designer, Jan Versweyveld, do an extraordinary job by turning the stage into a hectically bustling TV studio, but what I shall long remember is the performance of Bryan Cranston as the disturbed hero. He has the seamed, lived-in face of an American anchorman and suggests that Howard Beale is a modern, media-savvy King Lear in that his apocalyptic diatribes mix madness with a residual sanity.
You wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up by reversing the blessing of Dickens’s Tiny Tim with ‘God help Us, Every One.’
‘A Christmas Carol’ until January 20, 2018 (0844 871 7628); ‘The Secret Theatre’ until December 16 (020–7401 9919); ‘Network’ until March 24, 2018 (020–7452 3000)