WARNING: this play contains Humbugs! Those exclamatory words on the fly poster could belong only to Nick Lane whose sense of the daft has made his children’s shows at Hull Truck such a Christmas treasure.
Across Yorkshire, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has been this season’s play of choice, from the grand, frightening spectacle at the West Yorkshire Playhouse to the one-man shows at Harrogate Theatre’s Studio and the Kirkgate street at York Castle Museum.
On the icy streets of York, the York Horror Tour has braved sub-zero temperatures to spin nocturnal Dickensian ghost stories, while Green Hammerton’s Badapple Theatre has been touring the Broad Acres with A Yorkshire Christmas Carol, Kate Bramley’s new version that transforms Ebenezer Scrooge into a blustering skinflint Yorkshire farmer.
Lane’s new adaptation for five year olds and upwards is different again from these multifarious interpretations. Ebenezer Scrooge is still “the meanest, most miserable man that ever lived. Doesn’t like fun, is allergic to smiling, not so keen on children…and absolutely positively loathes Christmas”. In Lane’s world, however, his Scrooge also has a “hairy bum” because no Lane children’s show is complete without “bum” gags.
That is the only “bum” note in an otherwise magical show, full of phantasmagorical fun, and a wee bit of scariness, as befits a ghost story where “old Scrooge gets the fright of his life”.
Take the moment, for example, when the head of the dead Jacob Marley, his late business partner in the counting house, appears in the door knocker of Scrooge’s house.
As ever, writer-director Lane has his cast of four break down theatre’s wall to introduce themselves, explain their assorted roles and provide a Greek chorus-style running commentary.
Zach Lee is a lean and mean Scrooge in thin spectacles; Eamonn Fleming, Alice Selwyn and James Weaver play everyone else on top of being the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future respectively, their performances full of energy and humour and audience interaction.
Where Lane is so distinctive is in his verbal effervescence and his visual wit. He comes up with the inspired idea of the Ghost of Christmas Present evolving on the journey through Christmas Eve night because the present is always moving on. And so this ghost changes from a young Selwyn, to an older, plumper cross-dressing Fleming and onwards to a suspended balloon head.
As for Weaver’s Ghost of Christmas Future, Lane envisages him as a loose-limbed urchin in a hoodie who communicates with Scrooge only by speedily-tapped text messages in a witty but worrying vision of a future that is already here, innit. Inevitably, when this ghost bursts into song, composer Tristan Parkes gives him a rap that rhymes “Ebenezer” with “geezer”, whereupon Scrooge joins in with the street moves and the argot to bring the house down.
Once more, Nick Lane is streets ahead in the art of making children’s theatre such fun for all.
* A Christmas Carol, Hull Truck Theatre, until December 31. Box office: 01482 323638 or hulltruck.co.uk
Performances start at 1pm and 4pm, today, tomorrow and Thursday, and 1pm on Friday.
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