A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic review: a joyful, bravura piece of stagecraft

Rob Compton (Bob Cratchit) and John Simm (Ebenezer Scrooge) in A Christmas Carol at The Old Vic (2024) - (Manuel Harlan)

All through a bright, bitter winter day I was smiling because I was coming to see Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s story again. This inclusive, in-the-round staging by Matthew Warchus has become a beloved fixture of the London festive season since it premiered in 2017. A joyful, bravura piece of stagecraft, laced with carols and lit with lanterns, it’s rooted in the city’s streets – and its ongoing social problems – and performed in a theatre that opened six years after Dickens was born, and which he also wrote about.

Taking the role of Scrooge at the Old Vic is now a badge of honour for character actors, and a year after we had an incarnation of Doctor Who (Christopher Eccleston) it falls to an iteration of his nemesis The Master: John Simm. The Leeds-born actor brings a gruff, grizzled vigour to the miser and he doesn’t mind being dislikeable, though a bitten-off rising inflection in his early scenes makes him sound a bit like Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. Not a wildly inappropriate association, when you think about it.