This is a particularly haunting version of the Dickens classic. Bryony Lavery’s adaptation features not just the usual trio of Christmas spirits, sent by his ghostly former partner Marley to spook Ebenezer Scrooge into changing his loveless, miserly ways, but an entire chorus of spectral witnesses to his redemptive journey. Hollow-eyed and silver-grey, these wraiths are the dead from across the decades: there’s a First World War soldier, a starched 1930s nurse and a modern youth in a hoodie, as well as ragged Victorians.
Wreathed in smoke, they glide about Colin Richmond’s cavernous, shadowy set, which conjures a London as hard and stone-cold as Scrooge’s heart. Crooked tenements, Ebenezer’s comfortless office crowded with teetering piles of paperwork, or his vast, ornately carved bed with its snowy sheets appear with magical grace. These are displaced by riotous festive revelry, bustling street scenes or the climactic, terrifying vision of Scrooge’s future, presided over by a towering, sinister cowled phantom with the black wings of an angel of death.
Nikolai Foster’s production, deftly blending the thrilling and the poignant, is deliciously spine-tingling — and made more captivating by Jason Carr’s sophisticated score. At times the music recalls Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. It doesn’t attempt that work’s complexity, but it has a similar restless, minor-key unease; and the presence of Lavery’s uncanny onlookers, the murky urban setting and the tale’s theme of social inequality also mirror Sondheim’s fable. There are lighter sequences too; the Fezziwigs’ party ushers in a number as bouncily “oom-pah” as anything by Lionel Bart, and Nick Winston’s heel-kicking, witty choreography rises to such occasions with alacrity.
The show is as stuffed full of memorable cameo performances as a pudding with plums, thanks to a limber ensemble supported by local children and some dextrous puppetry. Peter Polycarpou, lower lip sulkily protuberant and brows fiercely knitted, is a persuasive Scrooge who, as he watches his own life unfold, turns from callous malcontent to piteous, lonely old man. Perhaps he could make more of the malcontent’s initial obduracy: he shows us glimpses, a little too soon, of the merry, capering creature that he will become and Foster’s staging suffers from a slight slackening of pace post-interval. But Lavery’s adaptation, the production and Polycarpou all employ an emotional directness that chimes as clear as Christmas bells with the compassion of Dickens’ novel. This is a Carol to make even confirmed Scrooges sing.
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