Take your pick of two spellbinding Scrooges
A Christmas Carol (Old Vic, London) Verdict: Dickensian feast for the eyes ★★★★☆ A Sherlock Carol (Marylebone Theatre) Verdict: Not sure about this, Sherlock ★★★☆☆
‘MARLEY was dead!’ It’s six Christmases since the old financier’s ghost first dragged his rattling chain the full length of the Old Vic to warn his partner. This version is now an established sight of London.
2022’s Scrooge is Owen Teale from Game Of Thrones and my favourite so far: fabulous whiskers, properly gruff, convincingly furious as he resists the nagging female ghosts. Only late on does he realise that he is not only a ‘squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner’ but has wasted his own chances of happiness.
That modern self-pity is part of Jack Thorne’s adaptation: while he wisely uses Dickens’s prose in narration he adds therapy- couch explanations about Scrooge’s cruel father and his lost love.
There are words like ‘manipulative’ and ‘you’re part of my story’, and a swipe at the disaster-TV age when he cringes from the ghost showing him a dying Tiny Tim — ‘is it wrong not to want to see that?’ But it
is still a glorious Victorian-Dickensian spectacle: mince pies as you enter, oranges thrown to the gallery, handbells, lanterns, rattling strong-boxes rising from the floor, carols. And an insane Christmas dinner avalanche from the roof, with parachuting sprouts and a finale with Marley’s ghost in tap shoes.
■ THREE miles north across Dickens’s city, beyond 221B Baker Street, the Marylebone Theatre has Mark Shanahan’s A Sherlock Carol, cheekily opening with the words: ‘Moriarty was dead.’
It’s 40 years on and a depressed Holmes is visited by Dr Cratchit: Tiny Tim grown up and earnestly curing other children.
Scrooge has been murdered after some shenanigans with a lost will and the precious Blue Carbuncle, which may or may not have been stolen by a descendant of Scrooge’s old employer Fezziwig.
It’s a brilliant mash-up, echoing lines from both books. Holmes doesn’t believe in spirits but on Christmas Eve, Scrooge’s ghost mockingly quotes him: ‘If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
I wanted to adore it — and it is only two hours (a big plus in my books) — but the first half is fussy with subplots and awful comedy accents your children may love but I didn’t.
And though Kammy Darweish is a gorgeous Scrooge, Ben Caplan’s detective needs to dial it up a bit in the first half to find the Sherlock magnetism. I know he had a hard time at the Reichenbach Falls, but that’s no excuse to be so mopey.