MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable study of the friendship between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, broken by a hostile state
A Christmas Carol
Sherman Theatre, Cardiff
HATS off to the Sherman Theatre for a hilarious and scary production of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.
This was not your usual dramatic take on the ghostly seasonal favourite, but an imaginative and musical version of the classic by writer Gary Owen and director Joe Murphy.
The well-trodden tale of the redemption of a penny-pinching money-lender has been given a seasonal boost by setting it in Cardiff and including comedy, puppets, singing and dancing as well as casting Scrooge as a woman. But the core of the story about Victorian attitudes towards the poor and the state’s violence to those falling on hard times remains. As Skylar noted: “People were cruel to poor people because they had no money.”
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
GEORGE FOGARTY is dazzled by a breathtakingly skillful puppet version of Shakespeare’s greatest love poem
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship



