A Christmas Carol @ Blackfriars Hall
This was nothing less than a magical, spell binding experience. The company not only offered up the thrill of being told a ghost story by Dickens, but also provided a genuinely entertaining experience for a contemporary audience.
European Arts Company
One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens came to Norwich and performed A Christmas Carol at St Andrews Hall. We can’t know exactly what the evening was like, but it was certainly a performance rather than a reading. He had learned the text and enacted it; playing the parts of the various characters with theatrical aplomb and with an exuberant gusto that reportedly enraptured his audience. In 2018, John O’Connor stepped into his shoes, with a view to recreating the experience, and after an enforced two year break, is back touring the show.
The Halls is one of the venues he has been able to return to, something that only added to the verisimilitude of his performance. The evening was tweaked, however, not least in the chosen performance space. Despite frequent visits to St Andrew’s Hall over the years, I had never previously been in the adjacent Blackfriars Hall, an altogether more intimate room. It’s still huge, of course, but somehow felt more welcoming than its cavernous big brother next door. What a pleasure to see it used for this performance.
More importantly, O’Connor and his team made significant changes to how the text was presented. I had been seduced by the thought of experiencing a truly accurate recreation of an evening with Dickens, and initially had misgivings when early signs indicated we weren’t going to get quite that. A moment’s reflection, though, and the idea of spending three hours watching a man declaim, however artfully done, might well be an educational experience, but I’m not sure it would have held an audience in the way Dickens did back in the day. Unlike that audience, we do already know the story of Scrooge. I can envy the audience that didn’t know what was coming, but I can’t hope to hang on his every word in the way they must have. On the other hand, too much smoke and mirrors, and the spirit of what the show was trying to achieve would dissipate as surely as the various ghosts. There have been countless adaptations of A Christmas Carol – some brilliant (Alistair Sim), some wacky (The Muppets) some awful (Albert Finney) so it’s a brave soul that has yet another stab at interpreting the text, but unless your version is interesting or different, what is the point?
O’Connor, therefore, was tasked with a balancing act between two conflicting objectives, and I have to say he carried out that task brilliantly. His performance ran for about ninety minutes, barely half the time it takes to read the full text, but it was abridged with great sensitivity and care. Barring one or two scenes that I noted were missing, there was little of substance that had been jettisoned. He prowled around the stage, eyes rolling in an entertainingly demonstrative fashion that could so easily have been just as Dickens intended. Pleasingly unamplified, he used natural voice projection that only added to an authentic presentation he had clearly taken great care to reflect upon. Directorial flourishes embedded in the performance by the late Peter Craze were sparingly done, offering up just enough movement to bring energy to the stage, without straying too far from what was supposedly a reading. The lighting from Duncan Hands combined with Matt Eaton’s subtle sound design to bring just enough colour and texture to an evening that might otherwise have lapsed into competent familiarity.
In short, this was nothing less than a magical, spell binding experience. The company was still intent of giving us the thrill of being told a ghost story by Dickens, but also attempting to provide a genuinely entertaining experience for a contemporary audience. If I have any doubts at all, it was the inclusion of an interval. Venues need to sell drinks and performers need a break, but I was so caught up in the drama unfolding at the half way point, I positively resented being pulled back out of it into the modern world, albeit for a brief fifteen minutes. Fortunately, such was John O’Connor’s skill as a storyteller, the spell was reset very quickly, and continued to weave up until the show’s conclusion. As a kid, I used to love being told the same story again and again (Top Cat, in case you were wondering) and it’s worth emphasising how cleverly this production brought out the child in its audience. It was no small feat to hold our attention purely through the power of the spoken word. To do so while telling a story that audience will be completely familiar with, was little short of remarkable.
