SCROOGE A MAN FOR ONE SEASON

 

There was Christmas before Dickens, of course, but not much of one. Christmas was an important day, but not, - if you read Pepys, - as important as 12th night, or as Hogmanay north of the border. Then came Dickens and the modern Christmas was born, a healthy baby it grew as strong as a Trafalgar Square Christmas tree and as fat as a stuffed Turkey. And at the heart of this newly created drama was the figure of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Like Hamlet, Lear or Churchill playing Scrooge is a role offered only to the truly gifted. For it is that most difficult of all parts a journey to conversion. Scrooge is truly vile, rarely has mean spirited, miserly misanthropic squalor been better portrayed. This is what makes the part so difficult to play. The greater the emphasis on moral squalor the harder it is to make the conversion convincing, the weaker the depiction of moral squalor the less spectacular the conversion. In my, admittedly old school, opinion, only Alistair Sim has ever pulled this off completely satisfactorily.

I have been recently reading a new production of A Christmas Carol, which plays hard and fast with Dickens storyline, hardly, of course, the first to do this. Mucking around with the plot has, like Brussels sprouts, become the mainstay of modern Christmas. Every year a new crop arrives featuring everything and everyone from the Muppets to Bill Murray.

 The production I am reading has the merit of being serious but begs more questions than it answers. It is a worthy attempt to turn the story into a socialist parable, but in doing so introduces themes that are ahistorical. Dickens was a reformer not a socialist, and the introduction of Freudian themes, the ghost of Christmas past as psychoanalyst, risks losing an older quasi biblical element of the story, that is the love of money for its own sake. Scrooge, after all, does not live a luxurious lifestyle but begrudges an extras halfpenny for bread. He is not the conventional capitalist living in luxury as his workers live in penury. He is a man whose soul has been warped and consequently a candidate for conversion. This tale is less an attack on capitalism than an exhortation to look at the man in the mirror, hopefully with better results than Michael Jackson achieved.

Still railing against new ‘takes’ on A Christmas Carol is as pointless as claiming that Christmas has become too commercial, – the Christians shoplifted a pagan festival, and it shows. Dickens stole it back, with a little Christian charity and brotherhood of man thrown in. For it is worth noting how little conventional Christianity appears in the story. Christmas day is a time for gluttony and merry making, not going to church.

Scrooge’s “Bah humbug stands the test of time because it speaks to an element in all of us, a capacity for self-centredness to which we would rather not openly admit. And the story too, despite its many flaws, not least the mawkish and nauseatingly sweet Tiny Tim, - who brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s remark on hearing of the death of Little Nell, “You would need a heart of stone not to laugh, -stands the test of time. And Scrooge is one of those great literary creations that burst out of the narrow confines of the work of fiction in which they are born.

So, I will say Bah humbug to all reworking of Dickens plot and, along with an extra portion of Brussels sprouts, will watch Alistair Sim shout from his window, “tell me boy what day is this...”

 

 

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