A Christmas Carol review – Dickens's social ills touch the mind but not the heart

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon David Edgar’s lively adaptation for the RSC foregrounds the tale’s reforming message and features Phil Davis as a grotesquely good ScroogeThe great thing about Dickens’s fable, which has spawned 250 film and stage versions in the last 70 years alone, is that it is infinitely adaptable. Where Jack Thorne in the current Old Vic production seeks to explain the source of Scrooge’s misanthropy, David Edgar at Stratford lays stress on Dickens’s anger at social evils. There is room for both but, in the end, I prefer the Old Vic version simply because it has more heart. Edgar, who famously adapted Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC, has had the ingenious idea of making Dickens himself and his editor, John Forster, part of the story. Dickens’s fury at the exploitation of child labour is changed from a tract into a tale only at Forster’s prompting. As the story proceeds, the two men turn from observers into participants, with Dickens taking the role of the young Scrooge at the Fezziwigs’ ball. Dickens even explains to Forster, who would surely have known already, that his childhood experience in the blacking factory could easily have turned him into a robber or vagabond. Continue reading…
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