A refreshing take on a Dickens classic, dark dealings in Elizabethan England and a news anchorman who finally flips at a mad world
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.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Decenber 06, 2017 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Decenber 06, 2017 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Tales as old as time
By appointing writers-in-residence to landscape locations, the National Trust is hoping to spark in us a new engagement with our ancient surroundings, finds Richard Smyth
Do the active farmer test
Farming is a profession, not a lifestyle choice’ and, therefore, the Budget is unfair
Night Thoughts by Howard Hodgkin
Charlotte Mullins comments on Moght Thoughts
SOS: save our wild salmon
Jane Wheatley examines the dire situation facing the king of fish
Into the deep
Beneath the crystal-clear, alien world of water lie the great piscean survivors of the Ice Age. The Lake District is a fish-spotter's paradise, reports John Lewis-Stempel
It's alive!
Living, burping and bubbling fermented masses of flour, yeast and water that spawn countless loaves—Emma Hughes charts the rise and rise) of sourdough starters
There's orange gold in them thar fields
A kitchen staple that is easily taken for granted, the carrot is actually an incredibly tricky customer to cultivate that could reduce a grown man to tears, says Sarah Todd
True blues
I HAVE been planting English bluebells. They grow in their millions in the beechwoods that surround us—but not in our own garden. They are, however, a protected species. The law is clear and uncompromising: ‘It is illegal to dig up bluebells or their bulbs from the wild, or to trade or sell wild bluebell bulbs and seeds.’ I have, therefore, had to buy them from a respectable bulb-merchant.
Oh so hip
Stay the hand that itches to deadhead spent roses and you can enjoy their glittering fruits instead, writes John Hoyland
A best kept secret
Oft-forgotten Rutland, England's smallest county, is a 'Notswold' haven deserving of more attention, finds Nicola Venning