BWW Reviews: A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Arts Theatre, December 10 2011

On a bare, dark stage, an actor stands alone and tells the familiar tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, visited by ghostly spirits and redeemed by Christmas spirit. Doesn't sound much, but that lone actor is Simon Callow – charismatic craftsman and interpreter supreme of Charles Dickens.

Over ninety minutes all-through, with just a few projections of the rookeries of Victorian London and a few chairs for company, Callow grimaces, guffaws and growls his way from Marley's ghostly apparition through the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet To Come to salvation for himself and Tiny Tim. Concentrating mainly on Scrooge himself and narration, he briefly inhabits the characters of nephew Fred, fun-loving Fezziwig, conscientious Crachit and, "God Bless us, every one", Tiny Tim, but this is not a showcase for an actor's power to switch between voices and personalities, but a straight recounting of the story. It's all the more powerful for that, bringing out Scrooge's realisation that Marley's warning about the chains awaiting him in the afterlife were binding him every bit as fast in the here and now. 

Dickens is a London author – its sprawl, its Cheek by Jowl poverty and wealth, its potential to plunge the highest to the lowest and raise the lowest to the highest, is present in many of his works and applies as much to the spiritual dimension as the material. Callow is a Londoner himself, born in Streatham and perhaps it needs a Londoner to capture Dickens fully. In a typical Covent Garden audience of day-trippers, tourists and locals, possibly the Londoners get the most from the story. They don't have to go far in the London of 2011 to see the alleyways and backstreets of its Victorian past and they don't have to go far to see the impact of business looking after business to the exclusion the human beings, some broken, some old and some ill, who invisibly serve its needs and cope with the backwash of its hubristic ambition. The heirs of the woman who extolled “Victorian Values” might be well served by a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.

Simon Callow in A Christmas Carol is at The Arts Theatre until 17 January 2012      

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