BWW Reviews: A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Greenwich Playhouse, December 7 2011

Shorn of its cloying Victoriana and pared back to focus on the impact of acquisitive amorality on individuals and families, Sell A Door's 21st century A Christmas Carol (at Greenwich Playhouse until 15 January) has restored the spiky outrage of the fable and will surprise those grown too used to the heritage industry emasculated figure Dickens has become.

The Cratchett Family suffer far less than the misanthropic businessman, driving home the message that, while the Welfare State is still staggering on, psychological poverty is more damaging than physical.

David Hutchinson's and Anna Schneider's direction delivers visitations every bit as spectacular as one would expect in the West End - all the more shocking for the proximity of Marley's clanking chains and Tiny Tim's NHS crutches. A young cast sing and act with great commitment, accompanied by the eerie music of Philip Ryder, lurking like mist, to add tension and mystery.

Jess Mack is malevolently pixieish as the Ghost of Christmas Present, as obnoxious in her own way as Tara Godolphin's Tara Palmer-Tomkinsonesque Ghost of Christmas Present. Stephen Barden's Scrooge (Scroogie to the Ghost of Christmas Present) is so wonderfully disdainful in the face of Lee White's less cowed than usual Bob Cratchett, that it's almost a disappointment to witness his transformation - liking the man we've loved to hate for an hour is the whole point of the tale, but a little more bastardliness wouldn't have gone amiss.

Greenwich Playhouse's ambition has again been realised in a show that is theatrically and intellectually impressive, as resonant today as its source material was in 1843. At Christmas, as the bonuses are handed out in the institutions whose amoral pursuit of profit tipped the world into an increasingly nightmarish recession, some of the beneficiaries could do a lot worse than to leave their gleamingly opaque glass and concrete towers on Canary Wharf and cross the Thames to learn from the bard of 168 Christmases past in a production that gives full value to his angry, political, reformist's voice.

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