A Christmas (New Year’s) Carol

🎄

I am pro-rules.  I like to set them and I like to follow them (particularly the ones I’ve set, obvs, much moreso than the ones I’ve not set and which can often be overly complicated and ludicrous, in my experience, like “the offside rule” or what is or is not a legitimate tax write-off).  One rule I set for myself: Christmas stuff is for pre-Christmas, never post-Christmas which is a sacred time for eating, sleeping, reflecting and arguing with your family. Another rule I set for myself (circa 2019): you must not under any circumstances buy tickets for A Christmas Carol.  Confusingly, this rule was preceded by its inverse rule (i.e. you must, come hell or high water, get as many tickets as possible for any and every version of A Christmas Carol you can find on god’s green earth) which I’d applied since birth, pretty much, or certainly since the births of my children, attending big and small productions, serious ones, funny ones, scary ones, and the singalong Muppet one at the Prince Charles Cinema (surely Sir Michael Caine’s best ever performance, right?). At a certain point my children, nearing adulthood, clocked on and asked, “Haven’t we seen this already?” and dug in their heels and simply refused to see yet another deeply average and often very disappointing adaptation of Charles Dickens’ marvellous book.

Reader, I have broken my own rules.  Further to a Boxing Day leftovers-lunch with a friend and her enthusiasm for the play and complete disregard for the rules, I bought myself just one solitary ticket to see Jack Thorne’s adaptation of A CHRISTMAS CAROL in it’s seventh year (or eighth if 2020 happened?) at the Old Vic, and now something of a London Christmas institution.  And I am so glad for my display of reckless abandon: it is brilliant.

I’d estimate I’ve seen an adaptation or other of A Christmas Carol in excess of 30 times, including taking Simon Callow and his one-man captured version to the IFP in New York, yet I don’t think I ever really, truly understood it until yesterday when I spent my New Year’s Eve afternoon in the Dress Circle of the Old Vic, completely enthralled by Thorne’s deeply moving adaptation and a simply wonderful in-the-round production complete with mince pies and satsumas for the audience, singing and dancing and snowfall.

One of the great joys of my life is going completely overboard at Christmas, welcoming waifs and strays to our festive table and gifting as much food and drink as anyone can safely consume and stuffing stockings and decorating trees with treasured ornaments collected over the years (including the Pedro Pascal ornament I gifted to myself this year….).  And there is always a Scrooge around who wants to fuck it up for me.  Sometimes there are two.

Thorne’s Scrooge, not unlike mine, is a man who has not reconciled himself to his past mistakes and his childhood trauma and takes it out on all and sundry, and the ghosts of Marley and Christmases past, present and future are simply giving him the option of breaking the cycle.  Thorne’s A Christmas Carol is about accountability and opportunity and self-will: if we want tomorrow to be better, for ourselves and for those we love, we must first take some responsibility for yesterday and today.  The play holds all of the ideas Walter Benjamin (and Wim Wenders, arguably) saw in Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: the storm of the past propels us into our futures. We cannot deny or control the storm, but we can choose to move with it or against it.  And it also embraces Benjamin’s concept of historical materialism (not unlike Claire Keegan’s wonderful novella So Late in the Day which explores the damaging consequences of men’s frugality and was originally called Misogyny…), which we cannot ignore in a country that remains frighteningly Dickensian when it comes to economic power and class (4.3M British children are living in poverty).

I think, perhaps, A Christmas Carol is also about forgiveness, of each other but mostly of ourselves, and as such it is a perfect play for these post-Christmas days; an ideal play for that sacred time of reflection and new year’s resolutions.  In fact, I’m going to set a new rule: you MUST see Jack Thorne’s A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic after Christmas, every year. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Now, there are six more performances of this (last?) year’s production, two of which are sold out, leaving just four performances over the next three days and tickets are in short supply…. I’ll race you to it.

Happy new year, all!