A Christmas Carol, a version by Jack Thorne – The Old Vic Theatre, London
The Old Vic is possibly the most dynamic of London’s traditional theatres. The space is unrecognisable every time I go in there.
This time, as we arrive for the revival of the Tony Award-winning A Christmas Carol, the stage is a brilliant combination of traverse and in-the-round, peopled by jolly Victorians in black coats and top hats handing out mince pies and satsumas. The cast are warm and bright-faced, as if they’d just come in from the London fog, chatting easily with front-row punters and gently tossing a satsuma or two to the upper circle.
A hearty cheer goes up every time they land one, the atmosphere ripe for comfort and joy. Owen Teale and the supporting cast do not disappoint. By the end of the two-hour show, the audience contained at least half a dozen grown men openly weeping. Usually it’s the women (and I was weeping too, it must be said) but this time it was older men. Perhaps it’s not that surprising, given that Carol is the story of an old man looking back on a life of missed opportunities.
The show opens with the black-coated chorus ringing out a carol on the bells, sombre, clear and bright. The ensemble have obviously been cast for their musical talents above all else, and it shows in the quality of the carols that weave in and out of the narrative.
The staging is simple, clever and effective. Scrooge’s office consists of black money boxes emblazoned with ‘Scrooge and Marley’, which Owen Teale lifts up from the floor as if from a vault, and stacks on top of each other and sits on them like a desk chair. Four door frames in a cross-shape rise from the floor, and form the structure of Scrooge’s office. He sits in the middle, looming over everyone who passes— just how he likes it. The doors rise and retreat into the floor like gravestones. Where once their structure gave Scrooge power and authority, later in the show they become a prison that he has made for himself.
Marley’s ghost is slightly disappointing. Perhaps I expected a floating apparition at the stairway, Muppet Christmas Carol-style. Frankly with this show’s ingenuity anything less is a disappointment. Instead this Marley simply walks up the traverse stage—not exactly ghostly. He’s got a lot of chains and he looks very green but the actor shouts too much and Scrooge is understandably not that frightened of him.
Things quickly pick up when a giant lantern swoops down from a great height towards Scrooge’s nose, making him drop to the floor. It just brushes his dressing gown, swinging back and forth on a giant pendulum. A rumbling, rushing sound gives the sensation, with the pendulum, of travelling back in time, and the ghost of Christmas past takes Scrooge to see his schoolboy self.
The ghosts of Christmas are all women in frayed patchwork Victorian dresses—one old, one young-ish and one quite young. They do the job. Young Scrooge is a twenty-something playing a nine-or-ten-year-old and sticks out a bit. But the show picks up again and hits hard with a slap from Scrooge’s father that knocks the boy (grownup Scrooge) to the floor. The child in Scrooge is knocked out of him that day.
You know the story, and if you don’t I won’t spoil it for you here. In this production Scrooge is confronted again and again with the possibility that he threw away life’s greatest pleasures—marriage, children, friendship, joy, Christmas. He rejects the idea: ‘I will not question myself.’ The possibility of his mistake is too painful to countenance. He excuses himself: ‘I once was better than I am. This is the process by which man ages.’ Can you see now why grown men were crying? No, says the ghost of Christmas present. You have become the cruel man that your father once was: ‘We were all made,’ she says, ‘But we all make in turn.’
‘This is not my fault!’ Scrooge almost pleads. ‘Then whose was it?’ the ghost replies. What will it take to get through to him? A child’s death, it seems. Tiny Tim’s body is borne to the grave by the actor who played Mr Fezziwig the benevolent undertaker, a satisfying final act for the man who showed the young Scrooge kindness.
In the second half, the consequences of Scrooge’s cruelty catch up with him. Owen Teale beautifully portrays a man crumbling under the weight of regret. In a final tear-jerker, Scrooge visits the boy that he once was, giving to him the gifts of hope and joy that were denied him as a child. ‘You could be an explorer,’ he tells himself, ‘or a philosopher!’ Don’t take on your father’s burden. They embrace. Not a dry eye in the house.
Finally Scrooge wakes to find it’s Christmas morning and Tiny Tim is alive, and the carollers are at the door and it’s like being a kid again on Christmas morning. It’s snowing! Clouds of soapy stage snow flurry down from the heavens.
Scrooge hands out whole boxes of money to the carollers, running around shouting about Christmas while he does it. Off he runs, under and back onstage, emerging sweating and out of breath, looking almost deranged with joy. His nephew agrees to transport their Christmas lunch to the Cratchit house, and out come metres of canvas from the heights of the upper circle, thrown by actors and assisted by audience members. They send down piles of food on a giant slide—oranges, apples, brussels sprouts.
I caught a glimpse of the audience members on the upstage bit passing along a fifteen-foot-long string of sausages and a Christmas pudding. A little girl helps Scrooge retrieve a jelly as tall as she. Utter joy and well-rehearsed chaos. Nine-year-old Casey-Indigo Blackwood-Lashley as Tiny Tim joins Owen Teale for the show’s final image, in which Scrooge and she join hands with the bell he’d been playing, and together they ring the last note.
A Christmas Carol is not without fault—some of the supporting cast shout instead of projecting. The ghost of Christmas present is especially guilty of this. But the hiccups and the faults are quickly left behind in the reeling, rollicking joy of the show’s atmosphere.
Moments of laughter follow swiftly after tears, and in between the carols float with angelic gentleness: ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, ‘The Coventry Carol’, and finishing off with ‘Silent Night.’ I’m still suspended in the show’s comfort and joy. Five stars. Tissues please.
A Christmas Carol is running until 7 January 2023 at The Old Vic Theatre, London
Buy tickets here
Feature image credit: Old Vic Theatre
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