Title:
A Christmas Carol
Single camera one-man performance
UK
That’s My Cue Productions
2019
57 minutes
Victorian
Martin Prest first performed a one-man-show version of A Christmas Carol on-stage in Cambridge in 2012, and has continued to tour the performance ever since. This recorded version was released straight-to-DVD in 2017 for sale via the production company’s website, and has subsequently been made available on streaming services such as Amazon Prime.
Cast and crew:
Evidently creating this show was a “lifelong dream” for Prest, who doesn’t have more than a handful of other credits to his name in visual media, but whose company That’s My Cue Productions has expanded into further stage shows since that initial Carol production, including Three Men in a Boat and Dracula.
It’s also Prest’s adaptation, rather than using Dickens’s
own performance version. The director of this recording was Jack Spring. Spring’s
first feature film, Destination: Dewsbuy, was released a couple of years
after this, in 2019, and according to his website he’s currently working on another
Carol-related project, about a struggling director trying to put on a
theatre performance of the story, so presumably he’s a fan!
Evidently creating this show was a “lifelong dream” for Prest, who doesn’t have more than a handful of other credits to his name in visual media, but whose company That’s My Cue Productions has expanded into further stage shows since that initial Carol production, including Three Men in a Boat and Dracula.
This is, at just under an hour, obviously a trimmed-down version of the Carol, although all of the major elements are present and correct. The editing does, however, mean that some of my personal favourite little touches and flourishes of Dickens’s writing are missing – Marley saying that Scrooge’s chance and hope is one of his procuring, for example.
Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past initially seems far more creepy than you might expect, and then after its initial encounter with Scrooge it comes across a lot of the time as a lot more smirking, perhaps. Prest also turns Belle into quite a whiny creature, and there’s an interesting bit in the editing of the text after her scene where the Spirit says that it is going to show Scrooge one shadow more, but he snuffs it out before we get to the second Belle scene of the book.
Present:
The Ghost of Christmas Present has probably the least successful of Prest’s attempts at putting on an accent. At first I thought he was doing Welsh, but then it seemed to veer more into Glaswegian at certain points, but he’s in good company with having such a wandering accent for this particular part, with it bringing up memories of Jim Carrey’s unsuccessful efforts in the 2009 animated version.
The scene at the
Cratchits’ house is the only one – barring any edits, of which more below –
where I noticed Prest ever being in danger of losing his way, as he stumbles
over a couple of lines in quick succession. There are two way of looking at
this. The charitable one is that if they’re trying to recreate the experience
of seeing the book read on-stage, then that’s fair enough. The other way of
looking at it is that it makes the thing feel a bit sloppy and amateur.
On a script note,
it’s interesting that while Ignorance and Want are included, there’s no mention
in this version of the Spirit having aged through his encounter with Scrooge.
The Ghost of Christmas Past initially seems far more creepy than you might expect, and then after its initial encounter with Scrooge it comes across a lot of the time as a lot more smirking, perhaps. Prest also turns Belle into quite a whiny creature, and there’s an interesting bit in the editing of the text after her scene where the Spirit says that it is going to show Scrooge one shadow more, but he snuffs it out before we get to the second Belle scene of the book.
The Ghost of Christmas Present has probably the least successful of Prest’s attempts at putting on an accent. At first I thought he was doing Welsh, but then it seemed to veer more into Glaswegian at certain points, but he’s in good company with having such a wandering accent for this particular part, with it bringing up memories of Jim Carrey’s unsuccessful efforts in the 2009 animated version.
Yet to Come:
There’s another of those bits here which you can more easily forgive if you decide you’re watching a recorded stage performance, as Prest sips from his glass of water a bit more often than he has through the rest of the production.
The Old Joe
section is slimmed down to him having just the one visitor, and although much
of the dialogue abut the bedsheets and such is intact, there’s another of those
instances where I miss one of the original lines, her saying that she wasn’t so
fond of him she’d have taken the bedsheets if he’d died of anything catching.
What’s To-Day:
This section contains the only instance I noticed of an edit. It’s carefully done in that they pick up with him as much as possible standing in the same spot, but unless it’s simply a mistake in the editing, there’s a definite cut here. It comes as Scrooge meets the charitable gentleman in the street on Christmas morning, and as they were happy to leave in those stumbles in the Christmas Present section, makes me wonder what went so wrong here as to cause a cut?
There’s another of those bits here which you can more easily forgive if you decide you’re watching a recorded stage performance, as Prest sips from his glass of water a bit more often than he has through the rest of the production.
This section contains the only instance I noticed of an edit. It’s carefully done in that they pick up with him as much as possible standing in the same spot, but unless it’s simply a mistake in the editing, there’s a definite cut here. It comes as Scrooge meets the charitable gentleman in the street on Christmas morning, and as they were happy to leave in those stumbles in the Christmas Present section, makes me wonder what went so wrong here as to cause a cut?
Review:
This is by no means an awful performance. If you’d paid to go and see it in the theatre, I don’t think you’d be disappointed. Prest does a commendable job of maintaining his concentration across such a large chunk of text, and I like the way he differentiates between when he’s playing the narrator and when he’s playing the characters – looking directly down the camera when he’s narrating, and away from it when he’s in character.
However, I do
also have to say that something about his very ‘Actorly’ style and voice and
his determination to show off an array of different accents does make this feel
a little like something you might see in a comedy sketch of an actor doing a
one-man show of A Christmas Carol. This isn’t helped by the scenery –
while the alternating backdrops for inside and out are quite nice paintings,
and often well-lit, the shaky manner in which they go up-and-down does give a
very amateurish feeling to proceedings.
This may well be
intentional, of course. I get the impression the whole thing is designed to
feel like a theatrical experience. But the problem is it feels a bit too much
like an am-dram one, which would be fine in a village hall but I don’t think
can quite hack it when subjected to this kind of glare, especially when compared
to the likes of the 1982 or 2018 performed reading versions.
In a nutshell:
A worthy enough effort, but if you want a one-man-show version, there are simply better options out there.
Links:
Amazon Prime
IMDb
This is by no means an awful performance. If you’d paid to go and see it in the theatre, I don’t think you’d be disappointed. Prest does a commendable job of maintaining his concentration across such a large chunk of text, and I like the way he differentiates between when he’s playing the narrator and when he’s playing the characters – looking directly down the camera when he’s narrating, and away from it when he’s in character.
A worthy enough effort, but if you want a one-man-show version, there are simply better options out there.
Amazon Prime
IMDb
No comments:
Post a Comment