Theatre Review: This Christmas Carol has a chilling resonance

A Christmas Carol
Old Vic, London, until January 6

Matthew Warchus has been putting on productions of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic since the beginning of time, but each year there’s a new Scrooge, and, with his writer Jack Thorne, he fine-tunes it a little bit more so it runs now like an old and much-loved Rolls-Royce. The former Doctor Who star Christopher Eccleston plays the old miser in this latest production and he’s a lot more sinister than Owen Teale, who essayed the part last year, or Stephen Mangan the year before.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Dickens’ classic on stage and this is the second I’ve seen this time around – the first was an spirited production at the Theatre Royal, Windsor – and the festive season has hardly begun. There is, however, always something new to admire or think about.
The withering contempt Eccleston’s Scrooge had for the poor and homeless – he’s all for letting them die off “to reduce the surplus population” – has a chilling resonance this Christmas under this uniquely heartless government of ours.

Tiny Tim always brings a tear to my eye and Alexander Joseph (he alternates in the role with Freddie Merritt, Freddie Marshall-Ellis and Casey-Indigo Blackwood-Lashley) is one of the best young actors I’ve ever seen in the part. Frances McNamee is also very good as Belle, the woman that Scrooge loved and lost.

Rob Howell has a lot of fun each year reconfiguring the set and this time, once again, the audience watch from all sides as the ghosts of Christmas past (Julie Jupp), present (Gemma Knight Jones) and Andrew Langtree, as Scrooge’s old boss Jacob Marley, warns him of how future Christmases will be like if he doesn’t mend his ways.

If you’ve not seen A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic before, do go and see it and I suspect you will become every bit as addicted to it as I have become.