If you’re not close to bursting into tears every time Tiny Tim says “God bless us every one”, you might not be a fit reviewer of an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. But Dickens is my favourite novelist, Christmas, my favourite time of the year, and I can be relied on to bawl for Tiny Tim every time.
That’s why this Gate production disappointed me so much. Because I wasn’t convinced that the cast or the director would ever bawl for Tiny Tim. Certainly not at a matinée performance a week before Christmas, anyway.
A novella does not become, to repeat the cliché, “a timeless classic” unless it contains some huge emotional truth. In A Christmas Carol, which Dickens wrote in 1843, he travelled to the heart of his own emotional loneliness as a young child, packed off to work in a blacking factory because his father was imprisoned for debts.
He fictionalises this loneliness in the figure of the young Scrooge, who is left alone at school every Christmas. In a rather simplistic, but quite compelling psychological analysis, he portrays Scrooge as a man who has built a wall of money around himself to defeat the loneliness of his childhood.
“You fear the world too much,” says his fiancée as she leaves him, in a passage used in John Mortimer’s adaptation. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.” We have all known people with this flaw, and indeed, we are living in a time when it seems as if a whole financial system has been built on it. The novella has never been more topical, either, in its evocation of the horrors of poverty, as world leaders argue in Copenhagen about whether to starve or drown with carbon the people of the developing world.
But loosen your grasp on the emotional truth of the story, and it becomes a pantomime. And that is, largely, what Alan Stanford’s revival of this 2002 production is. And it was appreciated as such by the audience who laughed loudly as Stephen Brennan slid or bounded across the stage as Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.
They laughed also when Barry Mc Govern cavorted around the stage as the repentant Scrooge, but without at any stage having been brought through Scrooge’s emotional wringer. He might have seen himself dead and mourned by no-one, but it came across as a bit of stage business. Mc Govern’s performance lacked, for me, any power to emotionally compel. And Michael Winder as his younger self, left all alone at school, seemed as put-out as a panto Prince Charming when Cinders goes home.
I love panto too, but it rightly suspends disbelief only partly. It was a shame to be reminded endlessly of panto during this production. The Londoners stood around chatting in animated groups exactly as if they were about to face forward and sing, “Come, come, come to the fair!” Particularly depressing in these scenes was a barefoot girl with cascading blonde tresses (Amber Rowan) with a baby in her arms, sharing the news with her cloaked and bonneted sisters. She has no shoes and it’s snowing! She would surely be more moved to have given the well-dressed burghers a kick in the kidneys with her frost-bitten foot, than to have stood chatting to them!
And in the home of the Cratchits, where sentiment must reign, it is entirely lacking. Hearty Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s poor clerk, seems caricatured in Michael James Ford’s performance and Miles Ronayne as Tiny Tim would have been diagnosed as faking sickness in our house and sent to school. Though he does not suffer from the comparison with the kids from the Barney show as do those other strays from panto among the children.
Lacking the focus of emotional truth, Scrooge’s nephew Fred (Stephen Swift), his wife (Tara Egan-Langley) and their relations seem to have resorted to the Commedia dell’Arte of Monty Python’s Upper Class Twits.
Mortimer’s device of using a chorus to break up the narrative does move the story along, but even such well-known actors as multi-part players John Kavanagh and Barbara Brennan have no room to distinguish themselves
The show is beautifully spliced with carols in part-harmony (Paul Keenan is the Musical Director), although Tiny Tim’s 'Away in a manger' comes across as a crude tear-jerker.
Bruno Schwengl’s designs, such as a split stage lit from behind windows to evoke a Christmas street, and memorably, the placing of the action behind a patterned gauze curtain to evoke the bitter night, are beautiful in themselves, but the costume design seems to owe too much to the Dickensian scenes on the Christmas biscuit tins. Design, in any case, cannot fight the show’s basic lack of conviction.
Victoria White is a journalist based in Dublin.