A Christmas Carol still the perfect holiday gift
December 11th 2010 20:46
Signature Tune
On its fifth go-round — two at the old address, three at the new one — the Soulpepper version of A Christmas Carol is as good as ever, and possibly better.
If God — or the composite spirit of Christmas — is in the details, then this show is multiply blessed. The moments of delight pile up. The solitary bulb, burning on stage at the beginning, that John Jarvis, the narrator, identifies as a “ghost-light”, traditionally designed to keep spirits at bay, and then removes because tonight he wants them to be present; the long white tablecloth that gets magically whisked from position and hangs briefly in the air like a furled banner; the momentary sight of a scimitar-flashing Ali Baba, summoned from a story-book; the giant clock-face projected on to the stage floor on which Joseph Ziegler’s Scrooge checks the minutes before the arrival of his next spectral visitor; the multiplicity of smiles that cross the face of Oliver Dennis’s Bob Cratchit, especially the amazed one that suffuses it when he takes in his employer’s transformation.
Ziegler, Jarvis and Dennis have all been with this production since its first Toronto appearance in 2001, and all three are joys to re-encounter. Ziegler has always been irresistible in the delirious caperings that attend his conversion, but his delineation of the earlier grimmer Scrooge has grown richer, sharper and deeper over the years. I tend to agree with Dickens’ biographer Edgar Johnson who wrote that a character who declares that anyone who wishes another a merry Christmas should be buried with a sprig of holly through his heart cannot be taken altogether seriously as a misanthrope; he’s protesting too much and too imaginatively. But an actor has to play it like he means it; and in his early dealings with his incorrigibly cheerful nephew, with Cratchit, and with the gentleman who comes to ask for charitable contributions (there used to be two of them, now it’s just one, ah the cruel times we live in), Ziegler displays an iron economy worthy of the miser himself. His melting begins early, but it was crafty of Dickens — and beautifully preserved in Michael Shamata’s in-the-round direction of his own adaptation – that his armour is first pierced by a kind of retrospective self-pity. He sees his childhood self at school, alone and abandoned when everyone else has gone home for the holidays, and the sight of the solitary boy goes to his heart as it does to ours. We can also appreciate his love for his sister, and sense that her early death helped make him what he bitterly became. Counting back, we can see how his early abandonment led him to focus his misanthropy on the idea of Christmas, despite his more positive experiences of the season during his apprenticeship with the Fezziwigs. I confess that these celebratory scenes, which involve much scampering up and down a step-ladder, have always struck me as the only weak spot in the show; in fact they bring out the unregenerate Scrooge in me. It’s impossible though, not to be charmed by the poignant, hypnotized dance-steps that Ziegler tries out with the girl of his dreams (a bewitching Sarah Wilson) after he’s watched her dancing with his younger self (Matthew Edison, who doubles as the nephew). And it’s very moving to behold him beholding that same younger Scrooge rejecting that same girl, while beseeching him to say something different, something that will change everything. At moments like this, A Christmas Carol becomes not just a moral fable but a universal human tragedy, about time irrevocably lost. It goes on, of course, to show the possibility of some future time being redeemed. Still, however happy the ending (and in this performance, it’s contagiously so), the awareness of past waste never goes away. Ziegler, an actor equally capable of iron and of gentleness and with a magical wit that binds the two together, gets both ends of Scrooge, and the developing middle, to perfection.
Bob Cratchit is a simpler soul, though hardly less of a challenge to act; Dennis, supremely well cast, moves us in all his gradations of grief and joy, without becoming mawkish in any of them. The production as a whole is a triumph of storytelling; Shamata is especially faithful, and especially inventive, in his handling of the succession of street-scenes with Scrooge moving through the crowds and being first aggressive and resentful, then wracked and fearful, and finally boyish and exultant. John Ferguson’s sets are resourceful and suggestive, Alan Brodie’s lighting superbly moody and evocative. Jarvis presides as Marley’s ghost and as all three spirits, powerful as all of them though sometimes overplaying both the sternness and the jollity. In truth, just about everyone in the cast, Ziegler and Dennis excepted, overdoes things at some point. But this hardly gets in the way of the message; the apparition of Ignorance and Want, the twin childish figures who are Christmas Present’s surprise Christmas present, remains another of the great moments. I remember feeling a little unease when I first saw this production; after partaking in a powerful lesson on charity, that left us with a virtuous glow, we were given no chance to do anything about it. Or that’s what I thought until the curtain-call, when we were asked to put donations into baskets held in the lobby by “young Crachits”: Ziegler’s phrase in his curtain-speech for what has now become a tradition. If it sounds simple, it is; if it sounds sentimental, it isn’t. This show, both in the auditorium and immediately outside, represents Soulpepper at its best, practicing what it preaches.
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