A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic review: a joyful, bravura piece of stagecraft

All done a bright, bitter wintertime time I was smiling due to the fact that I was coming to spot Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s communicative again. This inclusive, in-the-round staging by Matthew Warchus has go a beloved fixture of the London festive play since it premiered successful 2017. A joyful, bravura portion of stagecraft, laced with carols and lit with lanterns, it’s rooted successful the city’s streets – and its ongoing societal problems – and performed successful a theatre that opened six years aft Dickens was born, and which helium besides wrote about.

Taking the relation of Scrooge astatine the Old Vic is present a badge of honour for quality actors, and a twelvemonth after we had an incarnation of Doctor Who (Christopher Eccleston) it falls to an iteration of his nemesis The Master: John Simm. The Leeds-born histrion brings a gruff, grizzled vigour to the miser and helium doesn’t caput being dislikeable, though a bitten-off rising inflection successful his aboriginal scenes makes him dependable a spot similar Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. Not a wildly inappropriate association, erstwhile you deliberation astir it.

Though focused connected the cardinal show it’s an ensemble affair, the formed mingling with the assemblage connected arrival, handing retired mince pies and satsumas, and aboriginal cheerfully doubling and tripling roles and ringing retired hymns connected handbells. The masterful acceptable and costumes are by Rob Howell. The signifier is arranged arsenic a cross, with doorways astatine each limb hemming successful moneylender Scrooge – the “clutching, covetous aged sinner” – similar gravestones.

Most of the covering is achromatic oregon grey, but Scrooge’s ragged reddish topcoat is echoed successful the dresses of the 3 pistillate ghosts who sojourn him; the last, the tone of Christmas yet to come, is incarnated arsenic his dormant sister Fan (charming Georgina Sadler). The ghosts transportation lanterns of expanding size, arsenic Scrooge’s self-awareness grows.

The funereal commencement of the 2nd fractional is stark and yes, a small Doctor Who-ish with its looming spectres and distorted dependable over. The last coup de theatre, erstwhile a Christmas feast tumbles, parachutes and zipwires from the precocious reaches of the gathering to the doorway of Scrooge’s put-upon clerk Bob Cratchit (Rob Compton), excellent), is each the much delightful by contrast.

Underlying each the razzmatazz is Thorne’s intensely humane communion with Dickens’s motivation agenda. I fishy helium tweaks the script, but possibly it conscionable hits otherwise each year. This time, the closure of tiny businesses looms large, and the thought that “those with tin spend to enactment those without”. As does Simm’s reminder that 14m radical unrecorded successful poorness successful the UK, implicit 150 years aft Dickens’s death, erstwhile helium makes the accepted curtain telephone entreaty for a Waterloo nutrient bank.

I should beryllium inured to the mode this amusement tugs shamelessly but unsentimentally (for Dickens) connected the heartstrings, but each clip it gets me. When Scrooge is overtaken by emotion aft crashing the Cratchit’s meagre meal with his abrupt largesse, Tiny Tim notes: “You’re crying, mighty invader.” No, you’re crying.

The Old Vic, to Jan 4; oldvictheatre.com