A Christmas Carol
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
If the unreconstructed Mr Scrooge were around today, one of the things that would gall him most about Yuletide would surely be the superfluity of variations on A Christmas Carol. The classic movie with Alastair Sim. TV specials with Blackadder and Mr Magoo. A certain type of person never tires of revealing their supposedly eccentric passion for the Muppet version.
Oh, it’s no longer worth complaining. Charles Dickens’s novella now seems to replicate by mystical parthenogenesis. Turn your back and another three will have popped up.
Claire O’Reilly’s lovely, deeply spooky production for the Gate, working from a robust adaptation by Neil Bartlett, confirms (as if confirmation were required) that the fable still has traction after 180 years.
The text, apparently all drawn from Dickens, sets out to provide us with a traditional seasonal feast. No experiments with stir-fried goose. No deconstructed crackers. The raw ingredients are, figuratively speaking, turkey, sprouts and potatoes.
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We are in Victorian England, and Mr Scrooge is in his counting house on a freezing Christmas Eve. Bob Cratchit, his clerk, is eager to get home to poor Tiny Tim. After a day’s griping, Scrooge is visited by three spirits set on moral education. Everyone knows this. The story is now as recognised as that of the Nativity itself.
The imaginative staging, however, works new magic from that familiar material.
A lively, harmonic ensemble, beginning in pyjama-adjacent uniforms, dances, sings and chews through the still-crackling dialogue. Fiona Bell, as Marley’s Ghost, clanks down the centre aisle while wailing in a heathery Scottish burr. Lloyd Hutchinson, as a less reedy Scrooge than often represented, appears to be retaining his own Ulster accent, a windy timbre that suits a figure of Ebenezer’s initially less-than-festive demeanour.
All this takes place on a stage – credit to John Gunning’s lighting and Good Teeth’s set design – crested by Christmas baubles and furnished with an ingenious wooden structure that stands in for counting house, bedroom and, ultimately, mausoleum.
The speedy staging is simultaneously graceful and efficient. The ensemble run us through the chimes that herald the appearance of Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come. A fluid musical arrangement touches on folk hymnal and American spiritual as it makes the best of traditional fare such as In the Bleak Midwinter.
Those (ahem) allergic to audience participation can be reassured that it here involves only a bit of light singalong to Deck the Halls.
Some will wonder if this Christmas Carol, with no Kermit or Mr Magoo, is really suitable for smaller children. There is certainly as much Malthusian social pessimism as there is donning of gay apparel. The towering, shroud-draped Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is worthy of Hammer Films at its grimmest.
I say “Bah! Humbug!” to such people. The tiny me would have savoured the horror as much as (or more than) he revelled in the joyful denouement. I still do. Even if the reformed Scrooge, unlike the earlier, acerbic version, still seems a bit feeble-minded and easily pleased.
A Christmas Carol is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Sunday, January 18th
