Two marquee names—Dickens and Marie Jones—combine for A Christmas Carol, this year’s seasonal offering on the main stage of Belfast’s Lyric Theatre.
Translated to Victorian Belfast, Jones’s script is laced with the city’s broad, barkish vernacular, a dollop of its occasional lapsing into sentimentality and its robust way of storytelling.
Little is changed of Dickens’s seminal story—a virtual secular creation myth for the season “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely”—save for Jones positing it as a play performed by an amateur troupe. More incongruous is the interpolating of a visit by strolling Mummers and a dream sequence on far-remote Rathlin Island.
What those choices add is moot, the one serving to frame a simultaneously slick and rough-edged piece for ensemble playing, the others altogether curious digressions. Even so, the addition of a runaway turkey ought to be obligatory for all future stagings.
Matthew McElhinney’s animated production suffers from occasional lapses of clarity in the doubling of characters, and some confusion as swirling doors revolve from interiors to exteriors and from one location to another, but it succeeds in evoking requisite atmosphere and mood.
In that, he’s inordinately helped by Stuart Marshall’s set, artfully conjuring Belfast’s labyrinthine Entries (narrow city-centre alleyways) and Victorian skyline, superbly lit by Mary Tumelty with painterly concern for emotion and drama. Catherine Kodicek’s lived-in costumes add their own indelible sense of time and place.
No less integral is Garth McConaghie’s richly variegated sound design—a judicious amalgam of Irish folk songs, traditional carols, the choir of Belfast’s St Peter’s Cathedral, live-played elements and Hammer Horror effects.
At the heart of it all is Dan Gordon’s impressive, to the manor born performance as the gruff and ungracious Scrooge. Stubbornly allergic to the season’s allures and indulgences, he’s as mean and curmudgeonly as they come. Admirable is his casually pointed throwaway asides to the audience, courting but staying the right side of Scrooge’s bona fides as a boo-hiss pantomime villain. Transformed, he becomes the very personification of conviviality and generosity, carrying his new-found bonhomie out into the foyer on opening night to greet the departing audience.
Winning support is provided by Richard Clements’s skipping, carolling nephew, Marty Maguire’s Jacob Marley and relishable chain-clad Ghost of Christmas Past, Mary Moulds’s fizzing Mrs Fezziwig and the Cratchits of Matthew Forsythe and Jayne Wisener. Noteworthy, too, the Tiny Tim of Ellen Whitehead who adroitly avoids saccharine sentiment.
A pity that McElhinney’s interesting programme note about the preoccupation with time in this timeless tale lacks discernible traction on stage. But if the response of the first night audience is any guide, A Christmas Carol is already a Christmas cracker for the Lyric.
Reviewer: Michael Quinn