As fine a festive treat as Charles Dickens’s story of Christian charity may be, do we need quite so many Christmas Carols every year? Joyously, this musical reworking is different. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation still features Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and co, but Scrooge is a woman (Penny Layden, appropriately dour) and her backstory has been subtly yet movingly revised.
So has the framing: Scrooge’s story is spun on stage with Dickens (Elexi Walker) present alongside a “Ragged School” of children. He is a Pied Piper-like figure in chequered trousers who encourages them to make “magic” through storytelling after they are left in penury by their rich, hard-hearted benefactor, Scrooge. Dickens’s meta-interruptions grate at first but we are soon swept into the story-making.
Lloyd Malcolm brings out the ghostliness of Dickens’s story and her script contains genuine darkness, the drama full of frights and spookiness. Death and grief is explained to a family audience in an unflinching way. Happiness is not something that can be hoarded, Scrooge’s sister tells her on her deathbed, and it feels tragic.
The play is thrillingly directed by Rosie Jones while Frankie Bradshaw’s set design is a beautifully fluid and transforming thing: it changes in swirls as the children manipulate the action. A large hanging disc functions as an innovative backdrop, with closeups of Marley’s zombie-like death mask, the London skyline striped with chimney smoke and a twisted clock-face marking the story’s distortions of time.
Eamonn O’Dwyer’s soaring music and lyrics (with additional lyrics by Lloyd Malcolm) is foot-tappingly infectious and handsome song and dance numbers are perfectly timed. Every song is strong (with simple but effective choreography from Olivia Shouler) but the best comes last with a sassy cabaret number by a cockney pawnbroker (Natasha Magigi, excellent) after Scrooge’s death. It is astonishing that there are just five professional actors amid an ensemble of 40 Rose Youth Theatre members, playing an assortment of parts including one of the Christmas spirits.
There are challenges to Dickens’s notion of Christian charity and individual philanthropy too, which hover in the mind afterwards. For any of us who think this Christmas story is over-exposed, this gorgeous re-imagining proves otherwise.
At the Rose theatre, Kingston upon Thames, until 2 January
