A Christmas Carol – Barn Theatre, Cirencester

Patrick Ryecart and Nuwan Hugh Perera in A Christmas Carol at the Barn Theatre, Cirencester. Picture: Evoke Pictures

A Christmas Carol continues at the Barn Theatre, Cirencester until 11 January 2020.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Scottish singer-songwriter Finn Anderson is on a roll. Straight from a London production of Islander, for which he won the Musical Theatre Review award for Best Musical at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he has been commissioned to provide the music for the seasonal offering at Cirencester’s Barn Theatre.

This is an imaginative new version of Charles Dickens’ festive fable A Christmas Carol by playwright Alan Pollock that can only enhance the Barn’s reputation for lighting up the theatrical scene in the Cotswolds.

Pollock, along with director Phil Bartlett, takes the unusual route of exploring from the start why Ebenezer Scrooge has become such a heartless miser that he is in desperate need of Christmas-time redemption. Here Anderson’s music underscores Ebenezer’s ghostly journey towards rediscovering the joys of living. His use of familiar Christmas carols as mood music, reflecting the ups and downs of Scrooge’s odyssey, is particularly effective at key moments.

All this is left in the multi-tasking hands of eight actor/musicians filling a whole variety of roles alongside Patrick Ryecraft giving an impressively nuanced performance in the title role. Right from the start, Pollock’s ingenious concept has Scrooge as a detached observer of his character-forming past, present and future, teasing out the calamitous effect on his joyless life of an abusive relationship with his father, the early death of his sister Fan (Rosie Zeidler) and his cooling relationship with the lovely Belle (Bronte Alice-Tadman).

The device is to have Scrooge played as a young man by Tom Chudley-Evans, although the fresh approach does at times sideline Scrooge’s three ghostly night-time visitors, along with such enduring Dickens characters as Bob Cratchit (played by Scottish actor/musician Connor Going) and Scrooge’s nephew Fred (Nuwan Hugh Perera).

The rather thin nature of the narrative is covered up to some extent by the constant exchange of roles, the multiple musical skills of the players, and in particular by full use of the Barn Theatre’s array of technical gizmos.

Here choreographer Lucie Pankhurst also comes into her own, as does magic consultant Tom Brace and lighting designer Sam Rowcliffe-Tanner, with some eye-catching moments.

Designer Sophia Pardon provides a suitably sombre, largely brick-built Victorian set, but any impression that this is a rather introspective Christmas offering is dismissed by the sheer joie de vivre of the playing – and the timeless nature of the message.

John Houseman