Pitlochry Festival
Theatre
Five stars
The ragtime parade of
street-smart buskers who burst through the doors and freestyle into the
auditorium set the tone of things to come in Isobel McArthur’s new adaption of
Charles Dickens’ much reinvented Christmas classic. While the Royal Lyceum
Theatre, Edinburgh’s production moves the action to its own doorstep, McArthur
and director Ben Occhipinti have opted for something infinitely more modern,
even as they retain the story’s period setting. This sees the action framed by
the storytelling band, who step in and out of assorted characters inbetween
giving Christmas carols a jazzy reboot.
Colin McCredie’s Scrooge
is younger than how he is traditionally seen, played here by McCredie as a
dodgy money-lender who has no truck with charity chuggers, and certainly not
with his puppy-dog keen nephew, Fred, played by Samuel Pashby in reindeer ears
and a Christmas jumper. Once the shop doors are shut, Scrooge cuts a lonely
figure, with the flickering boulevard of street-lights that hang above him
giving him the air of a Citizen Kane type figure, painfully desolate in the
vast chasm of his self-made success.
Anna Orton’s set and Rob
Hiley’s musical direction are the keys to the noirish mood. A rendition of In
the Bleak Midwinter resembles a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack in tone. Kafkaesque
ledgers zigzag from the ceiling of Scrooge’s shop. Their black and white sense
of order is in stark contrast to the multi-coloured swirls that decorate
Fezziwig’s works do, hosted by a ghetto-blaster wielding Emilie Patry as the
bumbling boss.
What emerges from all
this is something that is startlingly contemporary, but which retains the
essence of its source, both in terms of its entertaining ribaldry and its more
serious social critique. Scrooge’s damascene conversion as he is given a
fly-on-the-wall introduction to everyday poverty and the damage it can cause to
families is an at times moving insight into how money can sometimes talk in
better ways than it does most of the time.
The Herald, December 2nd 2019
ends
Comments