The Night Before Christmas at Belfast’s The Mac stakes an early claim to being the highlight of this year’s festive theatre offerings in the city and beyond. Charming, colourful, delightfully silly, discreetly challenging, and laced with a comforting moral, it is a Christmas cracker of a show.
Lisa May’s slick, sure and super-charged treatment of Stephen Beggs and Simon Magill’s clever, knowing script pulls off that most difficult of seasonal predicaments in delivering an evening pitched at, and satisfying, young and old alike.
In a country down on its luck, the free-spirited adolescent Queen Talia finds herself under the thumb of an elderly and censorious Commissioner intent on supplanting her love of reading with brute “policy, process and procedure”. Cementing his evil scheme, he orders that books be burned and, stealing three fairytales from the journal of the Queen’s mentor, The Storyteller, Noelle, robs her of memories she must recover in order to restore balance. It’s no spoiler to reveal that, true to the season’s spirit, the Commissioner comes not just unstuck, but is finally converted to the joys of reading.
There’s clearly something in the air about the transformative power of stories, Beggs and Magill mirroring similar concerns in Tara Lynne O’Neill’s Hansel & Gretel currently at the Lyric. Children will see it as a straightforward contest between good and bad, light triumphing over dark. Adults may well recognise in it something more contemporary and cautionary as language is dangerously mangled into Orwellian Doublespeak and liberties threatened.
What wins through here is an involving sense of wonder that owes much, in no small measure, to Diana Ennis’s vivid and fun costumes and stunning multi-tiered, book-adorned set, James C McFetridge’s gorgeous, Tiffany lamp-lined lighting, and delightful projected animations by Fergus Wachala-Kelly. Garth McConaghie’s vibrant score and sound design adds its own enchanting layer to conjure varied and apt emotional moods, matched by Adam Ashford’s characterful choreography.
A delight, too, to see a cast that knows they’re onto something good and gives it their all. Allison Harding’s wise, warm and witty Storyteller spars feistily with Sean Kearns’s pompous Commissioner, a strutting blend of the Grinch and Dickens’s philistine teacher, Gradgrind. His put-upon assistant, Jack Watson’s battered and bruised Fiscal, channels Harry Potter’s Dobby and Mack Sennett slapstick with athletic aplomb.
Katie Shortt’s Talia is sweetly realised, her Little Match Girl’s solo song providing the evening’s most sentimental and affecting moment. Daniel Rivers’s The Duckling—“We don’t use the ‘U’ word”—positively revels in his vivaciously staged solo, "You’re Fabulous", while Nuala McGowan makes her own engaging contributions as Jem and Grandmother.
Adorned with a thick North Belfast accent, Kearns doubling as the Big Bad Wolf is a comic turn to relish. A Council building inspector in lupine guise, as he inspects and finds wanting the ramshackle houses of the Three Little Pigs, he warns: “I will huff and I will puff… and fill out the requisite paperwork”.
He’s ably matched by the porcine barbershop-harmonising trio—McGowan, Rivers and Watson—who sizzle like rashers in the pan in the show’s standout finale.
Scrooge himself couldn’t fail to succumb to this joyous spectacle.