A Christmas Carol

This was a very ambitious production - an exercise in cramming a quart into a pint pot.  St John’s Church Hall is a fairly small room, without a permanent stage.  For the production, a split level stage was installed, as well as tiered seating for the audience.  The stage was, at its peak, packed with a cast of thirty, with a three-piece band squeezed in to one side of the audience.  Despite the lack of space, the staging managed to achieve plenty of movement, with bustle in the crowd scenes and some very neat choreography, particularly for the Fezziwigs’ party, where the dancers executed an extensive set of country dance figures in quick succession.

This is not an easy piece musically, and it proved a challenge for the group.  For example, the opening songs require the lyrics to be delivered at a very high rate.  This can be difficult enough for a soloist, but demands very high precision of a chorus.  There were also key changes to catch the unwary. 

There were lots of good acting performances - Mark Symonds as the relentlessly cheerful Fred, Max Silver showing the shy side of the young Ebenezer, June Buxton as the cornucopia-wielding Ghost of Christmas Present, and so on - but really the structure of the story means that there is the principal character of Scrooge and a lot of cameos.  So what of Scrooge?  After his tours with the spirits, Peter Ansell’s conversion from skinflint to benefactor was entirely credible.

There were some fine pieces of theatricality.  Scrooge’s bed was mounted on the raised area at the back of the stage - some three feet above the main stage level, and Marley’s ghost (Mike Golden) entered from beneath the raised section amidst a cloud of dry ice.  Later, Beth Adams was flown in for her entrance as the Ghost of Christmas Past.  For the whole of the graveyard scene, Scrooge stood on the raised part of the stage, flanked by the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come (Patrick Cairnes) whose black robes flowed over the edge of the platform and down to the lower level, giving the impression of a figure nine feet tall.

The graveyard scene has two parts, with Scrooge watching the scarcity of mourners at his own funeral, and secondly, Bob Cratchit visiting the grave of Tiny Tim.  The latter could have been mawkish, but Nathan East got the performance just right so that it was moving without being over-sentimental.

© NODA CIO. All rights reserved.