Two months after Dickens’s story first appeared at Christmas in 1843 there were eight rival versions on the London stage. It has been endlessly adapted ever since, but Jack Thorne’s new version, starring Rhys Ifans as Scrooge, stands high on my list of favourites. In Matthew Warchus’s superb production it combines Dickens’s social anger with a genuine sense of festivity.
Thorne seems the right man for the job in that, as he proved in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Let the Right One In, he has a love of the spectral. He also instinctively understands GK Chesterton’s point that A Christmas Carol is “an enjoyable nightmare”. While heightening the fable’s hallucinatory quality, Thorne gives it unexpected psychological depth. Scrooge is here endowed with an abusive, debt-ridden dad whose presence helps to explain his own joyless addiction to money. The love he spurns as a lad is given tangible shape in Mr Fezziwig’s sympathetic daughter, Belle. Thorne has even tidied up Dickens’s ending in a way that makes me wonder if he has read John Sutherland’s marvellous essay How Do the Cratchits Cook Scrooge’s Turkey?
Warchus’s production also uses every resource available to turn Dickens’s dream-like story into an inclusive experience. Rob Howell’s design reconfigures the space so that a peninsula-like stage threads its way through the stalls. Four suitably skeletal doors rise up from the floor to admit Marley’s Ghost and the phantom shapes of Christmas Past, Present and Future, all played by women. While it would be a shame to reveal the devices used to get the audience to assist in Scrooge’s conversion, special mention has to be made of Christopher Nightingale’s music. Seizing on the story’s title, he adorns the action with carols, many played by the cast on handbells, that movingly counterpoint Scrooge’s misanthropy with a message of charity and hope.
That tension between two extremes is also implicit in Ifans’s excellent Scrooge. He has the right acidulous leanness and his spiky, straw-coloured hair betokens personal negligence. Instead of simply showing us a skinflint-turned-philanthropist, Ifans suggests, aided by Thorne’s script, a man damaged by life. Beaten by his father, forced into an early apprenticeship and fatally attached to the money-mad Marley, this Scrooge is warped by cruel circumstance. Ifans’s skill, however, lies in embodying the character’s lost potential for happiness, so that his conversion to glad-handing goodness is stripped of sentimentality.
No adaptation can ever capture Dickens’s surreal similes: at one point he tells us that Marley’s face, seen in a door-knocker, had “a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar”. But this version is staged with an audience-embracing elan and is performed by a terrific ensemble: I would especially pick out Myra McFadyen as the pram-pushing Ghost of Christmas Past, Erin Doherty as the caustically adoring Belle, Alex Gaumond doubling as both the mean-spirited Marley and Scrooge’s Father, and Lenny Rush as a cheeky Tiny Tim (one of four young actors playing the part).
This is Dickens done with love and affection. The fable’s warning about the danger of treating poverty as if it were a moral vice could also hardly be more timely.
• At the Old Vic, London, until 20 January. Box office: 0844-871 7628.
