Previously I’ve had a Scrooge-like aversion to the strenuous madcappery of Mischief Theatre but this revival of their farce about a malfunctioning amateur version of Charles Dickens’s Christmas fable had me laughing out loud. The brash, obvious, knockabout humour is laced with moments of lightning-flash wit and invention. It’s performed with verve by a cast prominently featuring some of the company’s founder members – three of whom wrote the script – and regular collaborators, who all met at drama school.
It’s an utterly (but not fussily) democratic show where everyone gets their moment in the sun and all dignity is sacrificed in favour of laughs. The direction by Matt DiCarlo - an American addition to the Mischief fold since they went transatlantic – is brisk and the stage management of the collapsing props and pratfalls impeccable. And underneath all the foolery, it’s a pretty faithful rendering of the original story, where the re-education of Scrooge parallels a journey to self-knowledge for the amdram show’s arrogant director Chris (Daniel Fraser). All this, and there’s a giant, ventriloquist-dummy version of Tiny Tim, too, that looms over the action like one of the lethal automata from Squid Game. God help us, every one.
