A Christmas Carol review: a festive treat that combines ‘childish pleasures and grown-up ideas’

Theatregoers will have no trouble getting their festive fix of A Christmas Carol this year, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. By some counts there’ll be nine stagings in London alone. The perennial popularity of Dickens’s 1843 story obviously “reassures playhouse accountants jittery about blows to the box office from Covid and the cost-of-living crisis”, while writers and directors are drawn to the contemporary resonance of Dickens’s attack on wealth inequality.

This year the RSC has got in early with a revival of David Edgar’s adaptation, first seen in 2017 – and set the bar “very high” with a version that combines “childish pleasures and grown-up ideas”.

Rachel Kavanaugh’s “sumptuous production” provides the “full, chocolate-box experience of Dickensian Victoriana, with a cornucopia of wigs, waistcoats and wassail”, said Patrick Marmion in the Daily Mail. It conveys Dickens’s social critique with clarity, while remaining abundantly “joyful and triumphant”.

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Chief among its pleasures, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph, is Adrian Edmondson’s “joyously propulsive” turn as Scrooge. It’s a recognisably “Edmondsonian” performance; but he conveys all the character’s “snarling malevolence, haunted bewilderment and belated contrition-rich kindness”. And if there is a “ghost of caricature” here, it only helps to fuel the comedy – “without short-changing the vital pangs of regret and remorse”. If I personally hope there will be fewer revivals of the Dickens classic next Christmas, that is certainly no reflection of this one.

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Edmondson is excellent – and so is the whole cast, said Michael Davies on What’s On Stage. Sunetra Sarker and Rebecca Lacey excel as two of the spirits of Christmas, and there’s a “wonderfully cheery turn” from Clive Hayward as Mr Fezziwig.

Indeed, there’s a “warmth and heartiness” to the evening, said Clive Davis in The Times – from the marvellous sets and “jaunty charm” of the score to the ingenious, gasp-inducing magic tricks. This is a Christmas treat that “pulls out one plum after another”.

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (rsc.org.uk). Until 1 January