A Christmas Carol – Belvoir

Overview

Upstairs Belvoir has transformed, and not just because of the blizzard happening inside. There’s some serious Christmas magic going on in that place. Pre-show, audience members dusted themselves with snow and took selfies with their friends while their children took more immediate joy in simply hurling handfuls of the stuff at each other. Post-show, Belvoir’s foyer was a sea of revellers wishing each other the best of the season, despite it being mid-November. This iteration of Dickens' yuletide celebration is daggy, fun and touching.

Director Anne-Louise Sarks and Benedict Hardie haven't strayed far from the original with their adaptation. Ebenezer Scrooge (Robert Menzies) puts the miser in miserable, as he begrudgingly grants his clerk’s request to spend Christmas Day with his family. He, on the other hand, prepares to weather another December 25 alone in a house that is kept cold and dark and empty. Having just settled in for a long winter's nap, Scrooge is disturbed by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, and three other spirits of Christmas, determined to show him the error of his ways.

The set (designed by Michael Hankin) is black, stark and sharply raked, a collection of jagged angles that suggest the action is taking place on a giant lump of coal. Thanks to an array of trap doors, moving platforms and some clever lighting from Benjamin Cisterne, the show has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. The moment when Scrooge suddenly finds himself in a graveyard is particularly well executed and chilling.

Menzies is a wonderful grump, but he also extracts a great deal of humour from some of Scrooge’s most heartless material. Steve Rodgers is dolefully funny and very gentle as Bob Cratchit, the loving father who can't bring himself to hate his monstrous boss. Kate Box’s Ghost of Christmas Present feels almost bigger than the space as she revels in merriment, while Peter Carroll does a fine job of balancing the comedic and macabre aspects of Marley's ghost (although it is his extraterrestrial wanderings which are the real highlight).

The modern era makes it almost impossible not to be plagued by some ghost of Christmas, whether it be trees appearing in shop windows from late August or the pressure of corralling large numbers of relatives into a festive atmosphere without the familiar bloodshed. Belvoir’s A Christmas Carol is a rare chance for adults and children to see past the mutant behemoth that Christmas has become and instead be pleasantly haunted by the ghosts of another era — the traditional spirit of the season.