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John Mortimer's version of A Christmas Carol combines politics with pleasure
I have often called adaptation the English vice. But even I am ready to admit that Ian Judge's production of John Mortimer's version of A Christmas Carol at the Barbican is highly pleasurable: a little restless perhaps but basically faithful to Dickens's extraordinary mixture of fantastical melodrama and resurrection myth.
Fidelity, of course, brings its own problems. As in David Edgar's Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens's descriptive prose is shared out amongst the cast who become group narrators. But matching the image to the word is sometimes difficult. When we hear - or read - that Jacob Marley's face in Scrooge's door knocker "had a dismal light about it like a bad lobster in a dark cellar" we are struck by the wild surreality of Dickens's imagination: when we see an actor's face appearing through a transparent knocker we are reminded how little like a lobster it looks.
Far more effective are those moments when the prose is allowed to do its work. When John Kane's Spirit of Christmas Present, attacking Scrooge's belief in human superfluity, cries "Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust" it speaks direct to the heart.
Indeed the production is often at its best when at its simplest. John Gunter has designed a busy set complete with silhouetted London skyscape, a Kafka-like office for Scrooge piled high with legal paper, a flying rooftop from which the hero can gaze down on the Cratchit household. But for me, the great moment comes when the stage clears and Scrooge is taken on a tour of earth and sea that encompasses miners on a bleak moor or mariners on a heaving sea: the use of space, light, song to create a sense of community is overwhelmingly powerful.
The abiding image of the production, in fact, is of Scrooge's isolation from common humanity: of the excellent Clive Francis, round-shouldered and corkscrew-nosed, gazing at the vision of his happier, younger self with wan intensity or desperately and invisibly seeking to join in the dances and games at his nephew's Christmas party. At such moments it becomes much more than a story about an old skinflint who turns into a charitable giver. It becomes a study in the fear of alienation and reminds us of the penetrating truth of Peter Ackroyd's comment that through Scrooge, Dickens offers an exaggerated, dream-like image of his own self.
But the appeal of the production, I suspect, will lie in its mixture of social conscience and showmanship. Sometimes the latter dominates the former; but the two unite perfectly in the moment when the childish figures of Ignorance and Want - "yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish" - emerge from the folds of Christmas Present's cloak. On the whole, Mortimer and Judge manage to rattle our bourgeois comfort while giving us a good night out; and the impeccable Francis, plausibly transformed by fear of death, is well supported by a large cast in which Philip Quast as Scrooge's beneficient nephew and Paul Greenwood as the exploited wage-slave, Bob Cratchit, make their distinctive mark.
