He looks resplendent in a fetching traditional dress, a wig of coiled plaits atop his head as he clutches his hands together and launches into a rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas.
Emmet Kirwan is certainly out of his sartorial comfort zone, his usual uniform of tracksuit top and jeans traded in for a full-skirted number ideal for swishing and twirling, but needs must when you’re in the cast of A Christmas Carol.
“Someone was saying that to me recently, like, ‘How come you always wind up in the tracksuit top?’” the actor and theatremaker says. “So this is certainly different. And they’ve just told me it’s being tightened, so I must have lost a bit of weight since rehearsals started. It’s all the dancing around.”
Kirwan, who, as well as being part of the ensemble, plays Bob Cratchit in Neil Barlett’s adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, is approaching the end of five weeks of rehearsals when we meet, just before previews begin for the Gate Theatre’s Christmas show.
RM Block
Under the watchful gaze of Claire O’Reilly, the production’s director, he and his castmates run through the Fezziwig’s-ball scene, in which the Ghost of Christmas Past (played with a blithe angelicalness by Wren Dennehy) shows the young Ebenezer Scrooge (Ian O’Reilly) a scene of festive merriment from his earlier life as his older self (Lloyd Hutchinson) watches on.
When the scene ends, the cast break into groups, some to discuss changes to the choreography with the show’s movement director, Paula O’Reilly, others to confer with its musical director, Anna Clock, while Claire O’Reilly floats around under the twinkling lights, tweaking and suggesting minor changes as the production’s final creases are ironed out.
It is not her first Christmas rodeo – last year she directed the Abbey’s hit adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma – but putting on a family-oriented show (it’s geared towards anybody aged eight or older) brought a new challenge. Nor was she cowed by the prospect of taking on such a beloved festive text.
“I think because my era and my sensibility skew towards The Muppet Christmas Carol, it wasn’t daunting for me at all,” she says, laughing. “That’s actually how I experienced the story to begin with. I don’t think I’d be able to do a version of this that was entirely for adults. Not even Dickens did that. So that’s actually a really joyful part of it.”
While Emma incorporated pop music and contemporary costumes, Bartlett’s Dickens adaptation, which was first staged in 1996, largely stays faithful to the Victorian period of its source.
“It’s really muscular, and there’s loads of momentum in it,” she says. “Neil’s done an amazing job of paring it down without losing any of the sense of heart or story. And he uses the language in a very playful, rhythmic way. That’s loads of fun.”
Bartlett “talks about the ensemble’s ‘conspiracy with the audience’. There’s an opening invitation where the ensemble meet the audience in what we’re calling their ‘ensemble basics’, which are basically like pyjamas – so it’s like a bedtime story. They are in costume, but there is kind of a knowingness of ‘We’re doing this with you.’”
She points to one of Catherine Fay’s costume designs. “We’re always aware of the actor underneath, and that is the artifice. I think that’s why you can multi-role across lots of different ages and genders, and that’s really playful and dynamic. So rather than going full contemporary with some of our gestures, it’s more like, ‘We’re all in the room now, and we’re doing this classic story together – but we’re doing it in Irish accents.’”
O’Reilly worked closely with some regular collaborators, including Fay, Clock and Paula O’Reilly. Clock wrote original music for this production as well as adapting traditional carols to suit the mood.
“Working with a blank page is easier sometimes, because you can make all the choices yourself, and you can work with the voices you have in the room and be really bespoke in thinking about how you’re placing things,” Clock says.
“But then, with source material, it can be a real gift. Some songs are brilliant, [but] it might be harder to pull out what’s exciting in a song that you might hear played in every shop at this time of year.
“And then also, on a technical level, everyone knows a slightly different version of a carol, so there’s a lot of preconceptions of the cast coming in, being like, ‘No, no, no – that’s not how this goes.’”
Paula O’Reilly, the movement director, agrees that there has had to be flexibility, working to the cast’s strengths and being mindful of them performing challenging moves night after night for the show’s nine-week run.
Then there are footwear, wigs and costumes to consider, as well as allowing for an actor’s character choices and the way they want to move. I mention that I noticed Kirwan’s dancing, a variation on a twerk, at one point during rehearsals. She laughs.
“I am open to people making suggestions for their characters, particularly if the actors are creatives and they’re makers of their own work,” she says.
“I’m really open to their ideas and what makes them feel good about performing the dance, and what makes them feel comfortable and happy to do it, rather than it being my way or the highway.
“Sometimes it is my way or the highway,” she says, laughing again, “but I’m not super precious or married to things. I’m open to chatting, or saying ’I’ve had an idea!’ and Claire and Anna being, like, ‘That’s stupid ... It’s perfect, let’s do it!”
Finding the right actor to play Scrooge was crucial. The ensemble cast double up on roles, but his casting, alongside that of other key characters, including Bob Cratchit, Marley and the ghosts, provided an important blueprint for the show.
“I didn’t know Lloyd, but I read his CV, and it’s incredible: he’s worked with all of my favourite directors multiple times,” Claire O’Reilly says. “And then I met with him on Zoom, and we just cracked up laughing.
“For something like this, that’s going to be so ensemble-led – and it is literally about a grumpy, difficult man – it needs to be played by the nicest man ever, [so that] you can really enjoy the redemptive story, and someone who’ll be onside for all of that ensemble magic and nonsense. Lloyd was just so obviously that. I knew immediately he was perfect.”
The London-based actor, who grew up in Antrim, is a stalwart of theatre, TV and film who has appeared in the Gate’s touring productions but never on the theatre’s stage. He smiles at O’Reilly’s compliment. “I mean, it’s anything that takes you out of yourself,” he says, stroking his luxuriant beard.
“I would hope that I’m a decent person with a fairly positive worldview – so to get into that nasty, miserly, horrible place ...” He grins. “There’s no question, it’s fun.”
Hutchinson first played Scrooge at school, when he was 17. “I just love this story, so I jumped at the chance to do it,” he says about his Gate role. His friend and fellow actor Tom Vaughan-Lawlor “got wind of it and said to me, ‘I hear you’re playing Scrooge. What an arc!’”
He laughs loudly, slapping his knee. “Only an actor could say that, but it’s true, because the arc is brilliant; this journey of self-discovery. So I just think it’s a wonderful story; it’s spooky and funny and sad all at once.”
From its very conception as a novel, Dickens toured around, reading it in communal spaces, so it was never really for the individual
Hutchinson mentions some of the acting legends have played the role in the past, including Alastair Sim, who gave an iconic turn in the 1951 film Scrooge, and Albert Finney, who starred in the 1970 film musical of the same name.
He’s putting those to the back of his mind. “You can only really use the material that you’ve got, and treat it like something you’ve never done before, or assume that the world has never seen or experienced before,” he says with a shrug.
“That way you might discover something new. I’ve been thinking about it in those terms. So I’m not daunted by anything. The Muppets don’t daunt me.”
A Christmas Carol is new territory for Kirwan, too. “It’s different from doing other Christmas shows, or even full musicals,” he says. “At its heart it’s a traditional theatre show, with all the bells and whistles. There’s also been fun and an anarchic sense of humour injected into it. But it’s quite a sad story. It shifts gears so many times.”
The relevance of Dickens’s 1843 novella to today, everyone agrees, is part of its enduring appeal. “It has a lot of resonance politically and with the social themes of today – with homelessness and poverty, and the real haves and have-nots – and how things have swung back wildly to that 19th-century way of being,” says Kirwan, who has written extensively about modern Ireland in his own work, and is an ambassador for Focus Ireland this Christmas.
Ultimately, however, “we owe people a good time. There’s nothing worse than coming to see a show and you don’t enjoy it,” he says. “So what people will get is something that’s incredibly well acted, incredibly well directed, beautiful costumes, beautiful sets – but, more importantly, a version of a classic tale that offers something very different.
“I think it’s a different proposition to something like panto, or something like in the Bord Gáis. It’s very much a show that’s about theatre; that has something you can dig your teeth into; that makes you feel like you’ve actually seen something with heart.”
Claire O’Reilly hopes it will appeal to people of all ages and backgrounds.
“It’s a story about redemption, about opening up, about looking inside so you can look outside,” she says. “From its very conception as a novel, Dickens toured around, reading it in communal spaces, so it was never really for the individual; it was about community. And what I hope our production will do is really embrace both everyone in the room and everyone on the stage.”
She grins as she heads back to rehearsals for another round of The Twelve Days of Christmas. “Everybody’s working hard to make this moment special together.”
A Christmas Carol is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Sunday, January 18th
