Do we all know the story? Scrooge has, after all, given his name to mean-spirited, misanthropic miserliness for the past 169 years.

On Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge was mean to people in the street, his clerk (Bob Cratchit), his nephew, gentlemen collecting for charity and carol singers. At home alone in bed he was visited by the ghost of his late business partner, Jacob Marley, in the metaphorical chains he’d forged for himself. Three visitations followed, from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, allowing Scrooge to recall where he had been, see where it had got him and foresee where he would end up.

Scrooge awoke, a transformed man, and set about celebrating Christmas Day by making it a joy for the Cratchits (anonymously) and his Nephew’s family, who welcomed him into their home.  

The title of this Eagle’s Nest Theatre production (from Australia) tells us Charles Dickens is presenting his own work in performance. To paraphrase A Christmas Carol’s opening sentence, about Jacob Marley, “Charles Dickens was dead: to begin with.” Phil Zachariah brings him alive in much the same way that the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come manifested those who were, are now and may be in the future.

As the Eagle’s Nest website states, they “have worked directly from the original prompt copy and eyewitness accounts to create a performance that truly channels the spirit of Dickens.”

Their typo-riddled programme note also reveals that Zachariah and director James Adler have explored the idea that the Narrator is “in some ways like a part of Scrooge, who having been redeemed now sustains his redemption by telling his story to others.” Not that they expect us to necessarily get that, but it has informed their approach.

The show’s success has been such, since it opened in 2003, that it now plays annually at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre. Its current New Zealand tour (click here for details) follows a season in Shanghai, while The Netherlands, Germany and Shanghai await.

The wide range of venues may well mean the tone of each performance varies but I assume the default mode is, as presented at Old St Pauls last night, one of Victorian theatricality. We are asked to marvel, as the author’s own audiences did, at the performer’s ability to act the part of each and every character with “a different voice, a different style, a different face” (Cambridge Independent Press, 1859).

And well we might. Zachariah and Adler do deliver an impressive demonstration of Victorian theatricality. But I cannot say I was drawn into the story or moved to examine my own value system – although I do objectively recognise that Scrooge’s initial lack of empathy for those less fortunate does remain part of our social fabric today.

The lack of immediacy and subjective involvement may have something to do with the past tense prose text being adhered to. I suppose it is too sacrosanct for them to change, e.g. by committing fully to making the narrator Scrooge himself, in the first person, and having him recreate his experiences in imagined ‘present action’. Yet such shifts are basic when adapting prose works for performance.

Nevertheless Phil Zachariah is impressively adept at adopting physical and vocal characteristics even if, sometimes, I can’t see the story for the acting. Is that what happened to sister Nan coming to take him home from boarding school or was that bit cut? And making Bob Cratchit all toothless and hyperactive – a wacky characterisation – somehow robs their story of its poignancy.

Theatre has come a long way in the last-century-and-a-half (although it was four centuries ago that Shakespeare had Gertrude calling for “more matter, less art”). I am not sure that simply recreating the Victorian mode is the most effective way of bringing A Christmas Carol to new generations.

Charles Dickens is reputed to have changed social attitudes with this story, which was published a decade before he ‘performed’ it. Given that today’s ‘market forces’ directly reflect the ‘laissez faire’ policies that encouraged the sociopathic attitudes he exposes, I see the challenge of remounting this story now as being to likewise confront prevailing value systems and aim for a similar impact.  

But given the difference between my response and that of Lindsay Clark in Christchurch (see link below), it may well be that Old St Paul’s, magnificent in so many ways, is just not conducive to a live performance that seeks to draw us into a subjective, life-changing experience. 

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It is a great pity that this splendidly crafted piece seems to have arrived unheralded and will be gone before word of mouth can do it justice. Those happy few who found their way to the venue enjoyed a generous and masterly incarnation of the great novelist, reproducing the readings which Dickens himself once took on tour to the world. His glorious blend of humanity, wit and impeccable showmanship are all given a thorough airing in the classic account of the miser whose cold heart was first cracked and then restored to joy by a series of supernatural yuletide encounters.

Director James Adler could hardly have asked for a better likeness or more expressive actor than Phil Zachariah in this solo tour de force. Physically and vocally he creates the Dickensian world in a beautifully paced piece of story theatre which is nothing short of brilliant. For a start, the director/actor team have struck an intelligent balance between relishing the rich language and bringing it to convincing stage life. The familiar story is given fresh impact.

The actor himself is able to project the colourful range of characters, sometimes in dialogue with each other, effortlessly. The stage at Middleton Grange is wide and deep, but such is the amplitude of this performance that it is always filled by the energy and implication of word and action. 

Thus a crabbed and shrunken Scrooge is confronted by the towering spectre of his erstwhile partner, Jacob Marley, complete with the dragging chains forged by a misspent life. The Spirit of Christmas Past creates scenes of Scrooge’s lonely childhood, failed romance and anti-social ways as an apprentice, before we are in the presence of the expansive embrace of Christmas Present, Scrooge’s nephew and the multitudinous Cratchits, including the blissfully sentimental sketch of the youngest, crippled, Tiny Tim.

And so on to the revelations of the spirit who reveals the future – unless Scrooge mends his ways. His unkind words have all been shown in a different light and Scrooge at last allows himself to be lit up with the simple joy of wishing others well. 

As a much loved classic as well as a Victorian period piece, this story is always worth retelling. When it is handled with the warmth and skill of this touring production it becomes in addition a must see piece of theatre. 

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