A Christmas Carol, theatre review: Inspired Christmas classic falls just short of a cracker

This uneven telling of the classic seasonal tale is a mixture of the inspired and the ponderous, says Henry Hitchings
Enduring message: Jim Broadbent as Scrooge
Johan Persson
Henry Hitchings10 December 2015

Jim Broadbent returns to the London stage, after a decade away, as Charles Dickens’s legendary miser Scrooge. He portrays him as a cold-hearted and slick marketing maestro, whose smile seems to be a mechanism for keeping his OCD at bay. He’s a damaged figure, and Broadbent suggests that an affection for stories is buried within him and has long been repressed. It’s a detailed performance, alert to Scrooge’s pomposity and also to the sheer ordinariness of his vices.

This version of Dickens’s classic seasonal tale reunites Broadbent with Patrick Barlow, once his collaborator in the National Theatre of Brent. It looks like a pop-up book, packed with deliberately two-dimensional props, but its enthusiasm for the story’s Victorian elements is matched by a modern interest in psychotherapy. We’re left in no doubt that Scrooge’s redemption is all about unlocking old memories.

While Amelia Bullmore’s Ghost of Christmas Past is a pale, ethereal creature with a towering mass of illuminated hair, the ebullient Samantha Spiro’s Ghost of Christmas Present calls to mind Barbara Windsor, continually hinting at deep reserves of bawdiness. There’s understated work from Adeel Akhtar as Scrooge’s amiable, maltreated clerk Bob Cratchit, and Keir Charles exudes a buzzy, almost manic energy as the foppish Mr Fezziwig, whose generosity is infectious.

Phelim McDermott’s production is full of invention, with neat puppetry and plenty of cheeky, lo-fi vibrancy. But at times it feels clumsy — a scene involving ice skating is especially weak.

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The tone of Barlow’s writing is equally uneven. Though it works hard to be touching, at moments it resembles pantomime, or a screwball comedy with jokes of variable quality, only to veer off into topical political seriousness — notably when Scrooge finds himself observing a protest about homelessness in Kennington.

The result is a show that’s a mixture of the inspired and the ponderous. Not a case of “Bah, humbug!” — but not exactly a Christmas cracker.

A Christmas Carol is showing at the Noël Coward Theatre until Jan 30. Buy tickets here.

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