A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - simply to say this simple phrase brings a smile to most people's face and why not? It might be the best short story ever written, or the best loved, or the best known or the most enjoyable, it certainly has to be performed as Dickens himself knew. It's December and we must have our pudding, our parsnips and our Christmas Carol. The story actually created our modern idea of Christmas, it influences Christmas, it is part of Christmas and it reminds us that there is more to Christmas than a shopping and eating festival.
The story is enormous fun but it is also surprisingly serious. Dickens warns that unless despair and poverty are banished from London the City will burn in flames.
Scrooge is frightened half to death and Marley is forever damned. Any director or dramatist who turns their hand to this most famous story will soon have to confront this problem: how to do justice to Dickens rather serious themes and still provide the Christmas feast of laughter and joy that the public want, even demand! All we can do is take you down the alleys that Dickens travelled, through a London that defined modern life because it was the first megalopolis, an urban nightmare where the very air was unfit to breathe. (The famous London fog was simply smoke). The wealthiest city in the world was the city with the most poor in the world. This was a contrast that Dickens dedicated much of his life and work to exposing. Today the truly poor have been banished to the Third World, London and its like are more comfortable places in which to live but we would do well to remember the message of A CHRISTMAS CAROL: that the Christmas Spirit is joyful because it shares its joy and its feast with others, especially the poor. The play is for them and for you.
