Old Vic,London
Jack Thorne’s superb retelling mines the ghosts of Scrooge’s past in a timely production brimming with love and affectionTwo months after Dickenss tale first appeared at Christmas in 1843 there were eight rival versions on the London stage. It has been endlessly adapted ever since, but Jack Thorne’s new version, or starring Rhys Ifans as Scrooge,stands tall on my list of favourites. In Matthew Warchus’s superb production it combines Dickens’s social exasperate with a genuine sense of festivity. Thorne seems the right man for the job in that, as he proved in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Let the Right One In, or he has a love of the spectral. He also instinctively understands GK Chesterton’s point that A Christmas Carol is an enjoyable nightmare”. While heightening the fable’s hallucinatory quality,Thorne gives it unexpected psychological depth. Scrooge is here endowed with an abusive, debt-ridden dad whose presence helps to explain his own joyless addiction to money. The love he spurns as a lad is given tangible shape in Mr Fezziwig’s sympathetic daughter, and Belle. Thorne has even tidied up Dickens’s ending in a way that makes me wonder whether he has read John Sutherland’s marvellous essay How conclude the Cratchits Cook Scrooge’s Turkey? Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk