Review of A Christmas Carol at Hull Truck Theatre

To slightly alter a quotation from the gentleman himself, we are (theatrically) in “the best of times, and the worst of times”. It is the season of the year when, all across the UK, theatre and performance companies are attempting to stage their annual money-spinner. The pantomime, the Christmas production, the box-office hit that will provide them with a good slice of the income required to carry them through into the coming year.

For several, this will mean that they deliver something which could be described as (and this is being charitable beyond words) “a pile of tat”. Shows where “star” performers, who haven’t got a clue about the traditions and the basics of the pantomime genre, turn up and stumble through the theatrical motions. It’s unforgivable, memorable for all the wrong reasons, but it happens. A lot.

Thank heavens then for the pockets of excellence, of which we have a fair few in the county, and there is no better example than that which we can find from Hull Truck. They have, in recent years, developed an enviable reputation of giving their audiences the very best of the adapted classics, and their current Carol is no exception. Charles Dickens is said by many to be the man who “invented Christmas”, and while that may be a slight exaggeration, he certainly contributed considerably to the ambience and the flavour of the moment with the cautionary – and redemptive – yarn about the old miser who is visited by the sins of his colourful past, and who becomes the very exemplar of the mood of the season. Or the mood of the season as we would hope to see it in an ideal world.

The mood of the world at the moment is, of course, far from ideal, but this timely production does, at least, send you out into the raw night with a feeling that there is, perhaps, a little light at the end of the tunnel and that we may hope to put cynicism aside and discover that it is not the headlamp of an on-coming train. Deborah McAndrew has done the filleting of the novel, retaining all the right notes, and keeping them in the right order, it’s a perfect flow, and the pitch is made even better by John Biddle’s score, which slides (apparently effortlessly, which is never the case) from the whiff of the macabre on the one side to the jollity of Dicken’s festive spirit on the other.

Sameena Hussain directs, and she draws some remarkable work from her team (the youngsters in the cast are superb) particularly Jack Lord as Scrooge himself, and Cynthia Emeagi and Lisa Howard as the Ghosts of Christmases Past and Present. Lord begins the evening with Scrooge as the exemplar of corrupt flamboyance, a city businessman whose only love in his life is firmly locked in a bank vault, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, slides into his being a rather jolly gent who might well be seen as the life and soul of the party. It’s an admirable study in nuance and shade. That there are just eight professional actors making this such a go-to event is not just special, it is truly remarkable. It has tone, and it strikes all the right notes. For that, well, Gawd bless us, every one!

To December 31.