Scrooge, Tiny Tim—in some ways we know these characters better than our own family, a phenomenon that presents potential hazards and rewards for any director attempting to stage Charles Dickens’ archetypal A Christmas Carol. Weaker stage productions of Dickens’ classic novel tend to fail along one of two faultlines. They overplay the sentimentality of the crutch and miss the irony altogether—A Christmas Carol is a morality play about how wealth separates people, yet imagine Scrooge’s epiphany if he’d had no money at the end. Or the director sets the story in some bizarre setting that advertises its complexities in bright neon—Scrooge as a packager of mortgage-backed securities who uses his connections at Freddie Mac to adopt the family he was set to evict at the beginning. Either way, the risks are large.
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“How, exactly, do you spell ‘Bah, humbug’?” Bob Cratchit (Alan Hickerson, left) works into the late hours for that grumpy geezer Ebenezer Scrooge (John Holdren) in Four County Players’ A Christmas Carol. |
Director Clinton Johnston’s staging of Michael Paller’s play avoids both pitfalls by framing the story as a play within a play, and opens with Charles Dickens, alone in the attic workshop of his London house, desperately trying to write something the night before Christmas. What better way to re-create these characters than to show Dickens struggling with primitive versions of them, like the boy who materializes in that first scene—part Dickens as a boy, part Tiny Tim, played by the puckish Peter Rice—who implores the struggling writer to remember “the boy on the crutch” in the bootblack factory the writer worked in as a child? It takes a minute or two, but once the memory is summoned, Dickens begins to write furiously as the lights go black; the next scene finds the writer with his family downstairs on Christmas Night, eagerly explaining, when they ask for a Christmas story, that he needs their help to act it out. The conceit is an interesting one—to have the audience discover the tale with Dickens’ family.
I was pleasantly surprised by many aspects of this production—not the least of which was the acting, especially the skillful manner in which John Holdren inhabited both Dickens and perhaps his most memorable character, Ebenezer Scrooge. Part of the pleasure of this production lay in small, directorial decisions—action in the actual story was mimed in the foreground and synched with real action in the background. This created a fascinating dramatic double vision that both drew viewers into the play and underscored the tension between the character Dickens and his creation, a tension that shot directly to the man’s shame over the poverty of his childhood. Similarly, in the play within the play, Tiny Tim is played by Dickens’ own son Charlie, an echo of the vision of the boy at the beginning of the production.
The actors moved smoothly with one another, especially during carefully choreographed set adjustments. And laughter is allowed, too: Witness the comic relief when two characters attempted to climb on top of one another, enswaddled in a piece of flowery linen, in order to create a larger-than-life Ghost of Christmas Present. “I don’t do ghosts!” says literary critic John Forster after the two topple over. “I specialize in more substantial creatures!” This is but one example of the play’s quiet wit: In fact, Forster did specialize in a more substantial creature—he wrote the first biography of Charles Dickens.
