★★★☆☆
Do we really need another adaptation of A Christmas Carol? It’s a question that the ever-astute Mark Gatiss raises himself in his programme notes for his new version, which will join the Old Vic’s annual production (starring Stephen Mangan this year) and a new musical rejig called Cratchit (at the Park Theatre) when it moves to London this month. And it’s a question that Gatiss answers with a resounding, “Yes! This is how you do it! This is how to make Dickens’s greatest hit feel both surprising and familiar!” — for the superb first half of his show at least.
As you might expect of Gatiss, a ghost-story enthusiast who co-created Sherlock and The League of Gentlemen, he brings a renewed emphasis on A Christmas Carol as something spooky and darkly funny too. The show opens in strikingly sinister fashion, with Nicholas Farrell as Scrooge and Gatiss as Scrooge’s partner Jacob Marley sitting 6ft above the stage on raised Victorian desks, their world of work dominated by brown filing cabinets that extend as high as the ceiling. Cackling at the thought of reducing Bob Cratchit’s wages, they are the Statler and Waldorf of 19th-century bookkeeping. Then Marley dies at his desk. At which point Scrooge shows that his idea of emotional intelligence is to snuff out Marley’s desk candle to save wax.
For as long as Adam Penford’s production keeps us in the shadows like that, it shines. Cast members manipulate a puppet dog that is as brown as the rest of Paul Wills’s set, then later lift Gatiss as Marley’s ghost so that he appears to levitate. The scares are good, and ingenious. The cast swap roles, which gives Gatiss the chance to make a few more cheerfully grotesque cameos.
It’s a story, however, that is all about moving from the darkness to the light. And in the second half it loses some of its torque as grumbly old Scrooge softens up. Farrell is a delight: he emits a Paxmanesque satisfaction in his sardonic misanthropy and makes us believe in a man who has come to see watching the pennies as obligation and pleasure alike. Yet from the moment the Ghost of Christmas Present takes him to see the Cratchits at home and he can’t help but dance along with their celebrations, his salvation is assured. After which there is a fair whack of stage time still to go. Heaven knows these days we long for a sense of everything falling back into place, but it all feels a bit too preordained.
Still, even if, like me, you can’t quite surrender to Farrell’s beamingly life-loving Scrooge 2.0, it’s almost impossible not to love the dancing, the carol singing, the snow. It’s never less than solidly done. Yet this adaptation goes from something remarkable to something more predictable but still pleasurable.
To November 20. Alexandra Palace, London N22, November 26 to January 9; christmascarolonstage.co.uk
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