A Christmas Carol
at the Chopin Theatre
But Dickens’s revered novella wasn’t just a potboiler, nor was it the saccharine, nostalgic piece of heartwarming family entertainment that’s usually presented today on stages and screens. More than anything, Dickens was voicing his moral outrage at contemporary British society. He spent much of late 1843 lecturing on the squalid conditions of England’s poor and their lack of education in particular. In Manchester, where he was speaking on these subjects to a working-class audience, he began to imagine the allegorical figures of Want and Ignorance—the horrifying children who emerge from the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present. Dickens understood their namesakes, growing up in the squalor of Camden Town just like the Cratchits; Tiny Tim’s impending doom wasn’t melodrama to Dickens, who watched two siblings die at an early age. Inspired, he wrote the novella in a fury, locking himself away for lengthy sessions. When he finished the manuscript in less than two months, by his own account he “broke out like a madman” into the streets, much the way Scrooge does at the end of his story.
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George Orwell once called Dickens’s characters monstrosities, and A Christmas Carol has some of his most effective ones. Ebenezer Scrooge, the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” is the most obvious example, and the shrouded, silently menacing Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and the horrifying ghost of Jacob Marley (whose jawbone falls off after he removes a bandage from his head) are also well-known. Dickens’s portrayal of the unmitigated creepiness of the Ghost of Christmas Past is less familiar: a strange fusion of child and old man, he has a blazing light shining from the top of his head and an ability to shape-shift, becoming “now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body.”
Tim Gregory, the director and coadapter of the Provision production, ups the number of explicit Christian references in the story, but with that exception his adaptation and Tom Creamer’s for the Goodman are remarkably similar. The Ghost of Christmas Past is a pretty young woman rather than a creepy man-baby, live musicians provide occasional accompaniment, Marley’s voice runs through a lot of reverb, the cast sings a perfunctory “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” at the end. Both shows even have Scrooge’s maid swigging from a flask. The main differences are matters of production values. At the Goodman, ghosts fly on wires, Marley appears in a flash of blinding light before he’s sucked into a red glowing abyss, and entire sets are rolled on and off the stage; in Provision’s production, ghosts travel by foot, and cast members move the props themselves during set changes. But in neither case is there any real terror or pathos. Both shows play equally nice and are equally unwilling to engage the text on its own terms. Certainly, such genteel entertainment is what audiences want from their family outings this time of year. But it’s worth remembering that A Christmas Carol is more Edward Gorey than Currier & Ives. Dickens’s moral outrage has been buried under the familiar festive warmth.
A Christmas Carol
