A Christmas Carol
Alexandra Palace Theatre, London

IN MANY ways the star of this show is the Alexandra Palace Theatre itself, reopened just three years ago after having been hidden away in a state of arrested decay for the past 80.
 
It’s the perfect Victorian setting for a retelling of Dickens’s most famous Christmas story, and director Adam Penford uses its dark, atmospheric chilliness to good effect.  
 
There are two main shivery moments on stage: the first sighting of Jacob Marley’s spectre and the surprise appearance of a set of howling white banshees swirling around the cavernous auditorium.
 
But while Mark Gatiss’s adaptation lays stress on the ghostly credentials of Dicken’s tale, it also has a Christmassy cosiness, epitomised by the presence of an anonymous elderly narrator sitting in a comfortable armchair at the corner of the stage.
 
The identity of that storyteller later becomes a novel and moving twist at the end of the tale, and there’s an equally surprising, if less inspiring, revelation in connection with the Ghost of Christmas Future.
 
Gatiss is happy to make such small departures from the Dickens script, adding in bits of dialogue, fitting in short new scenes and giving an extra, malign prominence to the figure of Marley – whom he happens also to play on stage.
 
For the most part such interventions work, although sometimes, such as with a superfluous deathbed scene with Tiny Tim, they appear to be little more than fillers while the set is readjusted.

There are also two Christmas songs which, while pleasant enough, could easily be omitted, and one wonders whether the production would be better at a slightly shorter length and without an interval.  
 
Nonetheless the overall package is splendid, with Nicholas Farrell as an eminently likeable Scrooge and Edward Harrison the standout of the ensemble as a careworn Bob Cratchitt.

Anchored by Paul Wills’s clever set, which at the outset looks to be nothing more than a collection of speaker stacks but turns ingeniously into the wooden filing cabinets and tall desks of Scrooge’s office, it has most of what you’d want from a staging of this most touching of stories, and avoids over-thinking its various elements.