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

- Michael Billington

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.