When Mark Gatiss and his cast were preparing their stage play of A Christmas Carol last year, they would come out of the rehearsal room in east London to be confronted by the line for the food bank. “You just think: ‘Scrooge and Marley live,’” he says. That was last year, before the play opened; it was filmed, and this year will be shown in cinemas, when the ghosts of the Cratchits seem ever more present.
“The way that the current iteration of the government has embraced cruelty as a badge of honour is horrible,” says Gatiss. “You think: ‘Are we locked for ever in this cycle of compassion and then absence of compassion?’” Gatiss loves Dickens’s book – he reads it every year. “It always amazes me how much anger there is [in it]. It feels sadly timeless.”
