A Christmas Carol (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon)
Verdict: Olde Worlde Dickens
Yet another Scrooge! Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre is one of several to have chosen A Christmas Carol for its December show.
The RSC has come up with an olde worlde look, broadly satisfying despite a few fussy additions by adaptor David Edgar.
Phil Davis gives us a properly crotchety critter as mean Ebenezer. His Scrooge is grey-haired, tssking, tight in his little sealed world. There is less of the jokey surrealism found in the London Old Vic’s current version.
Phil Davis gives us a properly crotchety critter as mean Ebenezer. His Scrooge is grey-haired, tssking, tight in his little sealed world
A large cast gives a good idea of a wide community — some minor characters are afforded zippy names such as ‘Mrs Snapchat’ and ‘Herr Uber’
Designer Stephen Brimson Lewis’s backdrop depicts a Victorian tenement block, flecked by falling snow. Scrooge’s four-poster bed rises mid-stage and levitates further to show us ghostly souls tormented in Hell.
Unlike the Old Vic, director Rachel Kavanaugh is here prepared to haunt her audience.
A couple of spectral touches, not least some ingenious business with a door-knocker and the dead Marley, may give meeker spectators the collywobbles. Quite right, too. Scrooge should be alarmed by the ghosts who visit him, as should we.
Tiny Tim (played on opening night by Jude Muir) is an orthodox, crutch-wielding heart-breaker. John Hodgkinson’s Fezziwig has an interesting vulnerability, making him all the more loveable.
The show is made longer than necessary by Mr Edgar inserting an opening scene of Dickens and his editor discussing Victorian child poverty
A large cast gives a good idea of a wide community — some minor characters are afforded zippy names such as ‘Mrs Snapchat’ and ‘Herr Uber’.
Add the usual RSC veneer of artful music, sumptuous back-wall images and a lighting design that creates a silver-edged entrance for Want and Ignorance, and you leave with a sense of assiduous professionalism.
The show is made longer than necessary by Mr Edgar inserting an opening scene of Dickens and his editor discussing Victorian child poverty.
I could have done without such clumsy preachifying. But otherwise, this is a Christmas plum.
No kidding, the goats are great!
Goats (Royal Court)
Verdict: It’s baaad
Rating: 
True to its title, the Royal Court’s Goats features frisky little goats. They are the only reason to see this muddled, boring play about political repression in Syria.
It may have legitimate criticisms of President Assad’s bully boys, but this production is a clunker.
With war killing hundreds of men, a lone father protests against the slaughter. The authorities move against him.
By way of a big gesture they offer each bereaved family a goat, to remind them of their dead sons.
Surreal satire, realism, comedy, tragedy? Director Hamish Pirie seems unable to decide. The casting is a mish-mash, the plot elusive. Video footage is used ineffectively. On and on it goes. By the end, almost half the audience had left.
Still, the goats are fun. One went slightly loopy, whacking its head against the floor, jumping on its hind legs and eventually racing off under the stage. Cue helpless corpsing from the stalls and even from the actors. Someone get that goat an agent!