A Christmas Carol at Rochester Guildhall/Touring

5/5

“WHATEVER we have in this world is borrowed for only a short time,” the old Welsh saying goes.

It’s one of the profound messages in A Christmas Carol and one of the many in this theatrical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novella which provokes reflection.

Ryan Philpott’s flexible adaptation for the Dickens Theatre Company, interspersed with banter, exposition and some lovely gender-fluid flirting, does full justice to the writer’s lyricism.

Six actors play 30 parts but the sheer speed and focus of their character changes, sweet vocal harmonies and the occasional switch into narrator mode keeps the story on its nimble toes.

There was a joyful response from the audience to the cast galloping across the aisles in the Guildhall’s intimate theatre space and the very young were mesmerised by spirits, high jinks and dancing, beaming with relief and joy when Scrooge laughed and leapt. We adults were just the same.

Eric Richard’s direction, precise, focused and energising, draws fine performances.

Martin Carroll, as Dickens and Scrooge, has a perfect visage, moving from scowl to melancholy to the wide grin of a man drunk on his own redemption, while the comic punch of the multitalented Nick Cavaliere has free reign.

There’s a touch of comic Omid Djalili in his take on Old Joe and the bartering over poor Scrooge’s bedclothes and shroud gives us the three witches meet the Three Stooges.

The cast are introduced as actor contemporaries of Dickens — a clever touch — and Hannah Blaikie/Ellen Ternan movingly conveys Belle’s great disappointment and, as Tiny Tim, has the audience empathising with his fortitude.

The utterly believable and nuanced emotion that Louise Faulkner brings to Emily Cratchit is perfect.

David Hedges’s philanthropist made me genuinely uncomfortable in his well-meaning zeal for Scrooge’s handout, while David Keeling as Young Scrooge shows in every movement how early promise was perverted, yet survived and thrived in the older, wiser Scrooge.

As Carroll led the cast in some belting carol-singing, Dickens’s characters beam at us and we beam back. Bring on “the seething bowls of punch.”

Runs from December 13-16 at Towngate Theatre, Basildon, box office: www.towngatetheatre.co.uk

LYNNE WALSH