A Christmas Carol or, to give it its full title, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story, at the Birmingham Rep is super. Adapted by Mark Gatiss and directed by Adam Penford, this production originated at Nottingham Playhouse in 2021 where they reprised it in 2023. This year, Birmingham Rep has got it and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up playing somewhere every Christmas for the next twenty years.
I must admit I had reservations at the start. That overlong title and Gatiss’s reputation as a writer who likes to reinvent classic stories, such as Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, led me to expect a clever update which was more Gatiss than Dickens, but it’s not. It turns out that Dickens’s full, original title is A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being A Ghost Story Of Christmas, so rather than adulterating it, Gatiss has restored it.
If you just transcribe the dialogue from Dickens's original novella, you get about an hour’s worth of stage time, so for a full-length play, at least half of it has to come from the writer and director. Gatiss has teased out a few storylines a little more than in Dickens’s novella, so this version opens with Marley still alive, and some scenes have a bit more dialogue than Dickens wrote, but it is true to the original.
The staging has a period feel to it as well. The main stage at the Rep can be a difficult space to fill, but the towering filing cabinets of Paul Wills’s set look suitably gloomy and Victorian. The cast of fifteen are in constant motion throughout the show, creating and striking different scenes and playing a wide variety of roles. There are no flown pieces; the whole set consists of trucks and pieces of furniture which are whisked on and off by hand.
There are some fantastic visual effects, but apart from Ella Wahlström’s spooky sound effects and Tingying Dong’s pre-recorded music, there is no stage machinery here that they didn’t have in the 19th century. Projecting onto a scrim, puppets, choreography and ghosts on sticks flying out over the audience’s head, it is all beautifully done and it gives the show a grounded, handmade feel.
Adam Penford’s production is full of beautiful, fleeting moments, and you are never more than a few minutes away from the next visual treat. Georgina Lamb’s choreography for the street scenes and Fezziwig’s party is terrific, Nina Dunn’s projection is subtle and atmospheric, John Bulleid’s stage illusions work brilliantly and Matthew Forbes’s puppets all add to the heightened reality of a ghost story for Christmas.
I had reservations at first about using an onstage narrator. It seems like an admission of defeat to wheel someone on to tell the story instead of showing it through the action, but Dickens's voice is a big part of the original, and the reveal at the end fully justifies it.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a good light comedy television actor is also a very good stage actor, but Matthew Cottle is a revelation as Scrooge. I only knew him from his role as Prince Edward in The Windsors on Channel 4, but he is the emotional centre of the piece. If we are not moved by Scrooge’s epiphany and redemption then the story doesn’t deliver, but he plays it beautifully. He resists the temptation to turn Scrooge into a pantomime villain, so when he says he just wants to be left alone, he sounds entirely reasonable, and as a result, his transformation is all the more convincing. If you have lost loved ones, then you can have a difficult relationship with Christmas, but my inner Scrooge was with him all the way, and I found his performance genuinely moving.
Rufus Hound gets his picture on the poster as Marley, but he is in a minor, supporting role alongside Scrooge. He has a lot of stage time, but for most of it, he is part of the ensemble playing a range of roles alongside the equally busy, and equally excellent, Mark Theodore as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Fezziwig and Oscar Batterham as Bob Cratchett.
There have been stage adaptations of A Christmas Carol for as long as it has been in print. Dickens himself used to perform it (Fun Fact: Dickens’s first ever public reading of the story was right here in Birmingham Town Hall), so does the world need yet another one? Probably not, but when it’s done as well as this, then there’s room for one more. One of my tests for theatre for young people is: if this was your first ever visit to the theatre, would you want to come again? I don’t think anyone of any age would be disappointed. I laughed and I cried; what more can you ask from a night out at the theatre?