A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic review: a joyful, bravura piece of stagecraft

All through a bright, bitter winter day I was smiling because I was coming to see Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s story again. This inclusive, in-the-round staging by Matthew Warchus has become a beloved fixture of the London festive season since it premiered in 2017. A joyful, bravura piece of stagecraft, laced with carols and lit with lanterns, it’s rooted in the city’s streets – and its ongoing social problems – and performed in a theatre that opened six years after Dickens was born, and which he also wrote about.

Taking the role of Scrooge at the Old Vic is now a badge of honour for character actors, and a year after we had an incarnation of Doctor Who (Christopher Eccleston) it falls to an iteration of his nemesis The Master: John Simm. The Leeds-born actor brings a gruff, grizzled vigour to the miser and he doesn’t mind being dislikeable, though a bitten-off rising inflection in his early scenes makes him sound a bit like Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. Not a wildly inappropriate association, when you think about it.

Though focused on the central performance it’s an ensemble affair, the cast mingling with the audience on arrival, handing out mince pies and satsumas, and later cheerfully doubling and tripling roles and ringing out hymns on handbells. The masterful set and costumes are by Rob Howell. The stage is arranged as a cross, with doorways at each arm hemming in moneylender Scrooge – the “clutching, covetous old sinner” – like gravestones.

Most of the clothing is black or grey, but Scrooge’s ragged red topcoat is echoed in the dresses of the three female ghosts who visit him; the last, the spirit of Christmas yet to come, is incarnated as his dead sister Fan (charming Georgina Sadler). The ghosts carry lanterns of increasing size, as Scrooge’s self-awareness grows.

The funereal start of the second half is stark and yes, a little Doctor Who-ish with its looming spectres and distorted voice over. The final coup de theatre, when a Christmas feast tumbles, parachutes and zipwires from the upper reaches of the building to the door of Scrooge’s put-upon clerk Bob Cratchit (Rob Compton), excellent), is all the more delightful by contrast.

Underlying all the razzmatazz is Thorne’s intensely humane communion with Dickens’s moral agenda. I suspect he tweaks the script, but maybe it just hits differently each year. This time, the closure of small businesses looms large, and the idea that “those with can afford to support those without”. As does Simm’s reminder that 14m people live in poverty in the UK, over 150 years after Dickens’s death, when he makes the traditional curtain call appeal for a Waterloo food bank.

I should be inured to the way this show tugs shamelessly but unsentimentally (for Dickens) on the heartstrings, but every time it gets me. When Scrooge is overtaken by emotion after crashing the Cratchit’s meagre dinner with his sudden largesse, Tiny Tim notes: “You’re crying, mighty invader.” No, you’re crying.

The Old Vic, to Jan 4; oldvictheatre.com