A Christmas Carol - 2020, play

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Live online streaming relay of stage play
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
The Old Vic
 
Year:
2020
 
Length:

2 hours approximately, including a 15-minute interval
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
Into the twenties! This is the first review on this blog of a Carol from the 2020s, although the text of this particular version actually pre-dates this. This theatrical adaptation had first been performed at London’s Old Vic in 2017, and had become something of a modern festive tradition – returning for runs with new leading men for Christmases 2018 and 2019. It had also seen successes when transplanted overseas, with productions having run in Broadway and Dublin, but due to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic it was all change for 2020.
 
Instead of being able to have audiences in for a new stage version, The Old Vic did what they’d also done for other productions during the pandemic and made it a part of their Old Vic: In Camera series. So every performance in the run would be staged live by the cast and crew in the otherwise-empty auditorium of the theatre, with a limited number of tickets available for each performance to view an online stream via Zoom. These performances, we are assured, would not then be available on a catch-up service – each one was unique, and live, and once they were gone they were gone.
 
This attracted me because it seemed like the closest you could get to experiencing the earliest days of live television drama. Of watching something on the screen that was being performed live many miles away, and yet could never been seen again.
 
Cast and crew:
This year’s Scrooge is actor Andrew Lincoln, who first came to fame as one of the stars of the critically-lauded, zeitgeist-seizing BBC Two drama series This Life in the mid-1990s. He then starred in Channel 4’s drama Teachers and had a prominent film part in the Christmas movie Love, Actually, before finding a whole new group of fans as the lead in the US cable television zombie apocalypse drama The Walking Dead.
 
Of the rest of the cast, most familiar to me personally was Clive Rowe as Fezziwig – Rowe had had a prominent guest role in the blockbusting Doctor Who Christmas special Voyage of the Damned in 2007, and would also be familiar to a generation of British children’s television viewers for his regular part in The Story of Tracy Beaker. Lenny Rush, who had been one of several boys sharing the role of Tiny Tim in the first two years of the Old Vic version in 2017 and 2018, returned to share it again this year, although on the night I watched it the part was played by one of the others sharing it. Presumably off the back of his success in the part on-stage, Rush had also played Tim in the 2019 television version.
 
Writer Jack Thorne is one of the most acclaimed television scriptwriters working in Britain today. He wrote for Skins and Shameless, collaborated on the various This is England series with Shane Meadows, and is the writer for the television adaptations of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. No stranger to fantasy material, he also wrote the Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

 
Underdone Potato:
We open with a nine-person chorus made up of members of the supporting cast, each taking it in turn to perform lines from an edited version of the book’s opening passages, dressed – and indeed performing – as a group of handbell ringers. I liked this, and thought it worked particularly well when they would suddenly all come together to say the same word or phrase at once, when particular emphasis was needed.
 
It’s quite a condensed version of the opening ‘stave’ of the book, and moves along at a fair old pace. The charitable gentlemen have been replaced in this version by a group of carol singers, with whom Scrooge exchanges most of the usual lines from that segment as he attempts to chase them away from his door.
 
Fred’s visit has also been cut down, although it does preserve one of my favourite lines which is often cut – the one about being fellow passengers on the journey to the grave. Thorne clearly likes it, too, as it get repeated towards the end as we shall see.
 
Interestingly, the exchange between Scrooge and Cratchit about the latter wanting “the whole day tomorrow” is gone. Instead, it’s taken as read that Cratchit won’t be in the following day, although Scrooge does mention wanting him in earlier on “Boxing Day” – which I think might be slightly anachronistic, or at least on the early side, for 1843, although in fairness it’s never stated when exactly within the Victorian era this version is set, and as in many cases throughout it’s an example of modern language for a modern audience.
 
In an addition from Thorne, Scrooge sends Bob out on some ridiculously long errands so he won’t be home until late on Christmas Eve – something Bob protests about because his son Tim likes to wait outside for him. This is a Chekhov’s gun of a line which literally comes back to haunt Scrooge later.
 
After Bob has gone, Marley appears very quickly. Most of this scene is played fairly intact to the Dickens, although with some interesting tweaks. Scrooge’s line about Marley being “particular, for a shade” (although changed to “phantom”) survives when it is often lost, and seems to have informed quite a bit of Thorne’s interpretation of the character – a sort of biting sarcasm which is present throughout.
 
Another line from the Marley sequence which I have always liked, but isn’t always included, is his one about this opportunity for Scrooge being “a chance and hope” of Marley’s procuring. Thorne keeps it, but also makes an intriguing addition – saying that this came for Marley as “not little cost.”
 
When Marley departs, there’s a very nicely-staged sequence of him being dragged away by his chains, which works very well.
 
Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past is female in this version, and doesn’t appear to have any particularly candle-like qualities. There’s an interesting similarity to some other versions as the first vision of Scrooge’s schooldays begins, with Scrooge calling out the other boys’ names. When the Spirit tells him that the visions have no consciousness of them, she adds a new line from Thorne: “unless we let them,” which quickly becomes relevant.
 
We see Scrooge as a schoolboy and have some of the often-omitted material about his younger self’s love of the fictional characters in the books he read. We meet Fan, and then we spear away from Dickens to also meet Scrooge’s father. In common with several other versions, Thorne goes much further than any implication found in the book and makes Scrooge’s father a drunken, abusive debtor – perhaps drawing more from Dickens’s own real life than from the fiction of A Christmas Carol.
 
This drawing from Dickens also includes some cross-pollination from the author’s other famous work, with Fezziwig’s business being specified as an undertaker’s here. Being apprenticed to an undertaker was, of course, briefly the fate of the eponymous character in Oliver Twist. It’s very common for adaptors of the Carol to add Belle into the Fezziwig party scene, but here Thorne goes even further – he makes her Fezziwig’s daughter.
 
Lincoln as Scrooge isn’t just watching these visions unfold before him – he enters into them, playing the part of his younger self in all but the school scene. There’s a perhaps surprising lack of subtlety at one point here when Thone gives Belle a line about, “those with can afford to support those without,” which is of course one of the messages of the book but feels a little on-the-nose. Then again, according to a caption ahead of the performance I watched, this is aimed at anyone from the age of eight upwards, so perhaps he just wanted to ensure even the youngest members of the audience got the message.
 
There’s an extra scene of Scrooge with Fan and his father at home, but no actual break-up scene with Belle. The second Belle scene isn’t here, either, but it isn’t omitted entirely – instead, it’s been moved to the ‘present’ section, as we shall see.
 
Present:
This was probably my least favourite section of the play – I think perhaps because it should have such moments of light in it, but in this version it really held only darkness.
 
The Ghost of Christmas Present is, like the first spirit, female – nothing wrong with that. But its manner is far from the jovial figure of the original and of most interpretations. Instead, throughout the spirit is very hard and harsh with Scrooge, which makes the whole segment feel rather unnecessarily bleak and cheerless.
 
There’s no doubt that the Spirit in the original Dickens can be like this – for instance, which it throws the “surplus population” line back in Scrooge’s face, or when it unveils Ignorance and Want to him (something which doesn’t happen here, perhaps not so surprisingly for a stage version). But I feel that’s all the more effective because it comes from a character we’ve seen to be so cheerful so much of the time – but when faced with Scrooge’s attitude it’s driven to such hardness. Whereas here, the hardness is ever-present.
 
There is a nicely-observed line from Thorne where Scrooge points out that the ghost is, “of the present, not the future,” presumably derived from Thorne’s thoughts on the exchange in the book between the two of them about Tim’s future. The Spirit, however, has a decent retort later, saying she is the “ghost of present causes” when she doesn’t just suggest that Tim is going to die, but actually shows Scrooge his moment of death. Tim doesn’t have any specific ailment in this version, but we are reminded of the fact he had been out standing and waiting for his father in the cold.
 
We also see Scrooge’s father again in this section, begging for a loan from his son, and we learn that old Fezziwig was also one of Scrooge’s debtors before he died. The latter presumably being inspired by the similar addition made to the 1951 film version. The scene of Belle and her actual husband is moved to this segment of the story, and as might be expected isn’t so light-hearted as the equivalent in the book, with Belle accusing her husband of regularly spying on Scrooge!
 
Yet to Come:
After the interval, we come into the second half of the play here. There is a brief suggestion of the traditional Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come – or as Scrooge calls it here, rather in the American fashion, the “Ghost of Christmas Future”. Its description is given by the chorus, but after this cameo its role in proceedings is quickly taken over by Scrooge’s sister, Fan.
 
This is where Thorne really veers away from the book, throwing out Dickens almost entirely for the whole segment. Instead of the mourning Cratchits, the relieved young couple, the mocking businessmen or Old Joe’s lair, we are given a series of brief monologues delivered by mourners at Scrooge’s funeral – Bob, Fred and even Belle. The Bob one is particularly odd, suggesting a gratitude to Scrooge even after having been fired by him following his falling apart from Tim’s death. I half-wondered whether there’s meant to be some suggestion Bob has become or is becoming as hard-hearted as Scrooge and is grateful to him for that, but there doesn’t seem quite enough of a thread to pull on there.
 
In some versions of the story the only vision Scrooge is presented with in the future is that of his own gravestone, which is ridiculous as everybody knows that everyone eventually dies. Thorne clearly thinks the same as he has Scrooge make the point here that it’s not exactly a shocking revelation to know that he’s going to die someday.

What’s To-Day:
There’s no boy for Scrooge to shout down to from a window – instead, Scrooge welcomes a couple of charity collectors into his home and confirms with them that it is indeed Christmas. He also showers them with money, in a scene reminiscent of some of those you see in certain silent and animated versions of the story.
 
The best of Thorne’s additions to the story comes here, as Scrooge decides to make his first port of call Belle’s house. It’s a melancholy and touching little scene, as he confesses that he wishes he had done things differently, but she says that she does not wish that she had. She points out that in waiting for Scrooge, she waited long enough to eventually meet and marry the man with whom she was happy, and she would not change that life.
 
There’s some lovely dialogue from Thorne here, as Belle tells Scrooge: “you are part of my story, and I’m delighted with how my story turned out.” His slightly mournful pleasure that “I was a part of your story” reminded of unrequited lover Ishmael’s line towards the end of David Guterson’s novel Snow Falling on Cedars – “I hope when you’re old and grey and looking back, you’ll remember me, just a little…”
 
Although admittedly, Andrew Lincoln standing in a doorway face-to-face with the woman his character loves in a Christmas production probably puts most people in mind of something else entirely.
 
The three spirits – well, Fan and the other two, depending on how you count them – get a cameo here, wondering what Scrooge will do now. What he does do is go to Fred’s, quoting his “fellow passengers” line at him and arranging for his entire Christmas dinner to be transported lock, stock and barrel to the Cratchits.
 
Things go from serious, moving drama to pantomime here, as there are all sorts of antics with various vegetables being thrown about, and Lincoln taking the piss out of a member of the crew who is presumably taking the place of a volunteer from the audience from the usual stage version.
 
“God bless us, every one,” from the chorus isn’t the very end of things here after the visit to the Cratchits. Instead, there’s a cameo with Scrooge and the spirits – including Marley – where there’s some debate over how changed Scrooge is and what this actually means now for his future life. Or indeed, whether or not it was all a dream. Interestingly, despite Marley saying Scrooge can only help himself and not him, he isn’t wearing his chains here.
 
There’s just time for a spot of carol-singing and a bit more bell-ringing, and that’s that.
 
Review:
I suppose the other adaptation with which this can be most closely compared is the 2019 television version by Steven Knight. They are both written by highly-acclaimed authors of esteemed British television dramas, and they both attempt to take a new look at the old classic through a decidedly 21^st century eye.
 
I’ve seen the pair of them the ‘wrong’ way around, because although this was a new production for 2020, Jack Thorne’s script of course was first written and produced before Knight’s version got off the ground. And I cannot help but think Thorne’s work must have been to at least some degree an influence on Knight. They both, for example, choose to make Scrooge’s sister one of the three spirits, something which I’m not aware of any other version ever having done.
 
Except that Knight seems to have decided to take some of the darker elements Thorne introduced and gone rather overboard with them. For example, whereas here we have only a brief allusion to Scrooge being mistreated by his schoolmaster, in Knight’s interpretation this was a full-on case of sexual abuse.
 
I made no secret of the fact that I loathed Knight’s script, but I will say that’s far from being the case with what Thorne has done. While I certainly enjoyed the first half of the play a great deal more than the second, Thorne both stays a lot closer to Dickens for the most part but also brings a touching quality to at least some of the extra or different scenes he introduces into the story – particularly to Scrooge’s final meeting with Belle after his redemption.
 
I do think, however, that the error both Thorne and Knight make is in feeling that the tale needs more of a moral lesson than it already possessed. As if they felt Dickens’s morality tale had become too chocolate-coated, too cosy in the retelling and the familiarity we have with it. That may be true, but unlike the pair of them I think you can still give it its power by stripping it back to what’s actually there, rather than adding what is not.
 
I can have no complaints, however, about the cast, although I do wonder about Scrooge’s sister having a Scottish accent. But it’s theatre, of course, and theatre – particularly in time of covid – is definitely a heightened reality where such things don’t really matter. And it was supposedly an Edinburgh gravestone which inspired Scrooge’s name in the first place, after all.

 
The only aspect of the staging which I found at all distracting was a lot of business with imaginary doors being opened and closed with accompanying sound effects. However, I’m not sure whether this was a deliberate stylistic choice, or more of a necessity for this production to ensure lots of different people weren’t having to touch the same door handles.
 
You could tell, of course, that this was theatre in the midst of a pandemic, with everyone keeping their distance, but it was staged and shot so well that I’m not sure you’ll have necessarily noticed that if you didn’t know. It would make an interesting case study for anyone looking back at theatre during covid-19 in the years to come, anyway.
 
Zoom of course will be a brand name forever associated with this time, and it seemed to hold up very well through the performance I watched – there was the very occasional stutter, but nothing serious and the picture held up very well. The sound quality was excellent throughout, and the camera work in capturing the live performance was on the whole very good. There was the occasional swiftly-adjusted out-of-focus shot, the odd spot of camera wobble and even a time or two when there had to be a sudden pan to find an out-of-shot actor. But I can easily forgive all that, and indeed it added to that long-lost atmosphere of live television drama which I wanted to see if this production might capture a little of.
 
In a nutshell:
It was fun to watch for the novelty of a live theatrical relay, and well done to them for getting it on at all. But I can’t hand-on-heart say I loved this version, which is a shame as it did start very well.
 
Links:
Wikipedia