Dickens Of A Time This Christmas
November 14, 2007
This Christmas, Northern Stage brings the most famous ghost story ever told to Stage 1. In a brand new adaptation for children over seven and their families, all the Christmas cheer and spooky goings-on of one of Dickens’ best loved tales gets a colourful lease of life with a classic Northern Stage twist.
A Christmas Carol is the timeless tale of a lesson in the art of charity taught to the original humbug. Ebenezer Scrooge is the meanest man in England. Nothing is closer to his heart than money. On Christmas Eve everyone is full of Christmas cheer – except Scrooge. When he dismisses their festivities and asks his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, to work on Christmas day, little does he know he is about to learn the true spirit of Christmas from some very unexpected visitors…
Originally written by Dickens in 1843 as a gift to reward his loyal readership, A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was a huge success selling over six thousand copies in a week. A groundbreaking take on the Victorian morality tale, there was a public reading of in Newcastle by Dickens’ himself in a hall off Grainger Street long since gone. Through his depiction of the mean-spirited old man, Scrooge remains one of the most famous characters in English literature.
Taking the part of Scrooge is North East actor Michael Hodgson, fresh from his role as the angry socialist Harry in Live Theatre’s The Pitmen Painters. In this new adaptation Michael is playing a Scrooge much closer to the novella’s miserly lonely man than the greedy caricature we’ve since become accustomed to in contemporary culture.
In the spirit of all things Northern Stage, A Christmas Carol is another epic production with 10 professional actors playing 29 parts between them. Michael is joined onstage by former Northern Stage ensemble member Mark Calvert as Bob Cratchit, Carol McGuigan (The Snow Queen for Northern Stage and Tales Form the Backyard at Live Theatre), Rod Arthur as the Ghost of Christmas Present (most recently seen as the corrupt Bede Connor running over Tosker’s bike in Our Friends in the North) and Chris Price (familiar to many Suggestibles fans) as Scrooge’s delightfully enthusiastic nephew Fred.
The company of ten professional actors are supported by a chorus, all of whom are drawn from Newcastle College’s second year performing arts students and Northern Stage’s own performance group.
The show is far from a sombre Victorian morality tale. Northern Stage’s production promises to take its audience on a fast-moving, breathless, heart-stopping ride through the darkest night of Ebenezer’s life – and its brightest dawn on Christmas Day. In this new adaptation, writer Stephen Sharkey has gone back to the original Dickens novella and very closely followed the narrative and much of the script is taken from the original text. As well as scary ghosts the play is full of humour and Christmas cheer: look out for Fezziwig’s stomping ball, a new carol written especially for the show and even a nineteenth century version of the party-favourite Twister. There will also be plenty of surprises in the familiar Christmas story, including new interpretations of the three Christmas Spirits and even an appearance by Charles Dickens himself.
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