Skip to main content

A Christmas Carol

Tramway, Glasgow
Five stars

 Ebeneezer Scrooge might well hang his head at the opening of the Citizens Theatre’s revival of their seasonal offering first served up in 2014. While all about him sing of the comfort and joy found through each other in times of adversity during the festive season, Scrooge is the perfect embodiment of self-serving greed. He may have been created by Charles Dickens more than a century ago, but, arriving onstage during a time when food banks are in abundance, Benny Young’s stone-faced portrayal of the self-loathing old miser sadly looks more contemporary than ever.

Scrooge himself, alas, appears terminally unrepentant in Dominic Hill’s production, reconstituted here by way of Rachael Canning’s already expansive set from the Citz’s proscenium arch to a three-sided affair that helps open the action out even more. This is helped by Neil Bartlett’s script, which is already fused with an inherent sense of playfulness in its pared down simplicity, so Hill’s ensemble can engage more directly with the audience. The scratching of quills by Scrooge’s bullied clerks goes beyond words in its depiction of the daily grind.

If there is a lightness to things that maybe wasn’t there previously, the sing-along moments help heighten the late-night eeriness of Scrooge being forced to face up to his demons. The latter comes largely through Canning’s puppets, from the faceless child of Christmas past to the monster of the future who looms in the gloom of Lizzie Powell’s lighting, where Nikola Kodjabasha’s live score played by the cast clatters and rumbles.

If there is one figure who becomes the play’s conscience, it is Tony Tim, the sickly child of Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchitt, who is a symbol of how a poverty-ridden society can destroy lives and families while the wealthy squirrel their ill-gotten riches away. Scrooge’s Damascene conversion is a necessary display of philanthropy, as well as a pointer to greater solutions in what might just be the most important Christmas play for today. 

The Herald, December 10th 2018

Ends


Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more