It’s Christmas Eve, and Ebenezer Scrooge is counting down the seconds until the silliness of the season passes. Deeply entrenched in his own misery, Scrooge receives a visit from four ghosts who whisk him away on a journey through Christmases past, present and future. Here, he revisits fragments of his life and is faced with a number of choices. Redemption is his for the taking – but is Old Scrooge capable of changing his ways before it’s too late? 

 

There is nothing quite so Christmasy as A Christmas Carol with its themes of greed and generosity, love and hatred, and bitterness and forgiveness. It has been adapted in a variety of forms and has been the inspiration for many classic tales over the years. 

 

So it's a bit unusual to have a straight adaptation of the text, with no real significant changes, and a heck of a lot of Dickens’s actual dialogue in the production. It gives it a sense of transcendence, taking us to a different time and place, almost Shakespearean in nature. 

 

But what truly makes this production one of the best I’ve ever seen is how it’s all creatively realised. Eugene Gilfedder is perfection as Scrooge, exactly how you would imagine him to be. But instead of a two dimensional baddie, Gilfedder infuses him with humour and humanity, bringing us a rare Scrooge as we truly journey with him on his evening of transformation.

 

The rest of the cast, each playing a number of roles each, are truly superb, especially Bryan Probets who plays the Christmas spirits masterfully. The production itself from the swirling, moving set pieces to the use of modern technology in projection and lighting is truly incredible and immerses you right into the story itself. 

 

A masterful, faithful adaptation of the Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol has the perfect Scrooge, an incredible cast, and stunning production and set design filled to the brim with Christmas magic which makes for quite possibly the best stage production I have ever seen.