A Christmas Carol

Synopsis

A Christmas Carol is the most famous book Charles Dickens ever wrote and one of the most daring. As the Ghosts spirit Scrooge from his past to his present to his future, Dickens plunges the reader cinematically from the miser's dank and creaking house in the City to riotous festivities, from cozy hearths to graveyards. And all the time the author's voice, tender, savage, magisterial, is present.

Our Review:

8 December 2005

Winner of the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment in 1994 (when it beat out Stomp to take the title), Patrick Stewart’s one-man version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has returned to the West End this Christmas at the Albery Theatre after the premature closure of Duckstastic. It may be just a filler here, but it’s also surprisingly filling.

Continuing an oral tradition with this story that was begun by Dickens himself with his famous readings, Stewart first performed it as a filler for his own career. During his seven-year run as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, he came to wonder how, as he comments in a programme note, “I could keep my stage muscles in condition as I spent all my days in front of a film camera.”

The work he has devised (and perhaps ill-advisedly, also directs) himself is definitely a work-out in every sense. On a bare stage populated only by a lectern, a high desk and sto...

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