Title:
A Christmas
Carol
Format:
Filmed one-man
performance
Country:
UK
Production
company:
BBC Films / The
Space
Year:
2018 (released to
cinemas on December 11th that year, and the broadcast on BBC Four on
December 16th)
Length:
72 minutes
Setting:
Victorian (sort
of… the tale is being told in an anonymous space, but it is the original
version)
Background:
Years after he
wrote the Carol, Dickens became well-known for his personal readings of
an abridged version for live audiences, something he carried on doing right up
until the end of his life. In the years since others have performed one-man or
-woman show of the Carol – such as Patrick Stewart, who we’ll come to
tomorrow – but probably none so deliberately attempting to evoke some of the
style of Dickens himself as Simon Callow.
Callow is a great
lover of Dickens’s work, and has long been associated with A Christmas Carol.
As well as performing his one-man version of the book based on Dickens’s own
reading, including in excerpts for the BBC in 1996, he has also played the man
himself on film and television on several occasions. The year before this film
was released he played the book’s original illustrator John Leech in The Man
Who Invented Christmas, a film about how the Carol came to be
written.
Publicity for the
film tied it in with the Carol’s 175th anniversary, and it
was a good idea to capture for posterity Callow’s performance of the story.
Although it did have a short cinema release across 444 cinemas in the UK and
Ireland, most people are likelier to have seen it five days later when it was
broadcast on the BBC’s arts and culture-focused channel, BBC Four. For this
broadcast, there was an option to listen to it in ‘binaural stereo’ via
headphones – the process which apparently makes it seem as if the sound is all
around you.
Cast and crew:
Being a one-man
performance, the cast of course numbers just one – the aforementioned Simon
Callow, finally getting to star in a version of the Carol worthy of his
talent and love of the story, some seventeen years after lending his voice to
Scrooge in the 2001 animated version. He was also seen as Dickens in some
versions of that film, bookending it with live action sequences of the author
performing one of his readings, and had played him in other productions
including two episodes of Doctor Who in 2005 and 2011, both of which
referenced the Carol.
Although he does
have some other film and television credits to his name, director Tom Cairns is
mostly a man of the theatre, where he has helmed both ‘straight’ productions
and operas, including for the Royal Opera House. He’d also both directed and
designed for Callow’s stage version of his one-man performance of the Carol,
which made him the perfect choice to helm this – he’s also credited alongside
Callow for the adaptation, so was undoubtedly one of the driving forces behind
the project.
Musicians and
sound designers Ben and Max Ringham are responsible for the atmospheric and
evocative soundtrack, having also done extensive work for the stage, including
for the National Theatre.
 |
| Scrooge, PI. |
Underdone Potato:
This is all very
intriguingly set up. You might expect it to take place in some Victorian study
by a roaring fireside, with Callow all done up as Dickens, reading from some
enormous leather-bound volume.
Instead, Callow
is in a modern suit in what looks like it might be some abandoned warehouse or
office building at any point in the late twentieth or early twenty-first
centuries. There is the occasional relevant bit of scenery or a prop, and
clocks on the wall or the floor showing the relevant times, but for the most
part he seems to be wandering through some melancholy otherworld.
I formed the view
across the production, as Callow walked between various different but similar
set-ups, that perhaps these were the places mentioned in the Carol but
many years later. Scrooge’s counting house and home, Fezziwig’s business, the
old school, all abandoned and empty, long after Scrooge and everyone else in
the story is dead and gone. It’s probably not right, but I liked the idea of
it.
Callow does a good
job of always making sure you know which character is speaking in dialogue
scenes without ever straying into silly voices or overly-extravagant gestures. It’s
an absolute tour de force from him, as you’d expect – this is the sort
of thing he was born to do.
It isn’t all
entirely Callow talking to the camera. To add a bit of variety, there are one
or two voiceover scenes, including of Callow walking up the stairs as Scrooge arrives
home which makes the thing seem a little like some hard-bitted detective drama.
When he is home and Marley arrives, this was the one part I felt they’d
compressed a little too much – Marley’s visit seemed to be over and done with
very briefly, and without as much of the original Dickens dialogue as I would
have expected.
Past:
There was a nice
jump scare at the beginning of this – I knew there was going to be a final ‘bong’
from the clock, but they make it sound really quite creepy. Callow’s reaction
probably helps to sell it as well.
We get some snow
indoors which adds a sort of magical realism feel to proceedings, and this was
when I first began to wonder if the locations might be the settings of the
story long abandoned, with the large, bright, barn-like room through which
Callow walks here perhaps being the abandoned school.
There’s a lovely
little bit in the Fezziwig scene where Callow does line about “her brother’s
particular friend, the milkman,” with a sort of implied raised eyebrow which
could be indicating any one of a number of different things about what’s going
on there!
 |
| Argh! |
Present:
There’s a very
nice use of shadow at the start of this section to have Callow as Scrooge turn
and look at his enlarged shadow on the wall, representing the spirit. We get the
usual trip to the Cratchits’ and to Fred’s part, both rendered very well and
faithfully, although nothing of the other bits and pieces from this section in
the original story.
Yet to Come:
The text about
the body seems quite different here – I haven’t read Dickens’s performance
version, so I don’t know if these were changes he made, or ones made for this
production. The Cratchit scene is different here, too, with Bob coming down
from upstairs with Tim’s body rather than in from having been to visit the site
of the boy’s grave, although he does discuss it as usual.
What’s To-Day:
We get a precise
time for how long the boy took to come back from the poulterer’s – four minutes
and twenty-seven seconds! We also get an exact street address for Bob over in Camden
Town.
Review:
This version is
based on Dickens’s own performance version of the Carol, which was
obviously abridged but was also tweaked and subtly changed in various places,
evidently right up until the end of the author’s life – he could evidently
never quite resist tinkering with it. All of the main familiar scenes and characters
are there, but if you’re very familiar with the original 1843 book you’ll
notice certain chunks of text shortened or missing, or some moments different
to how they were before.
The only part of
the story where any of this really pulled me up short, however, was in the
Marley section, which as I mentioned above did seem to have been cut rather to
the bone. Or should that be to the chain…? But aside from that, this is a
full-blooded version of the story, with Callow giving it gusto without ever
going over-the-top. There is a danger with these sorts of one-man shows that
they can veer into being unintentionally comic, but the only place I found I
had a laugh that wasn’t meant was with Callow’s cry of ‘Belle!’ at the end of
the Christmas past section. This put me in mind of no less a character than The
Fast Show’s Rowley Birkin and his meandering, only semi-intelligible
monologues – but for there to be only one such moment in a production of this
nature is probably quite a good thing!
One element which
did, however, feel slightly less successful than everything else was the sound
design. I like the idea of having sounds and elements from various parts of the
story coming in under and around Callow’s voice at various points, but at times
I felt this was rather overdone and could have been used more sparingly and
subtly. I wonder if they got over-excited about the idea of it being broadcast
in binaural stereo for those with the relevant equipment, and decided – or were
told – to add as much in for such viewers / listeners as possible.
In a nutshell:
A one-man
performance won’t be to everyone’s taste, of course. But if it’s the sort of
thing you think you might enjoy, I highly recommend this – a wonderful, comfort-viewing
telling of the Carol to luxuriate in at Christmas time.
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