A Christmas Carol (ish)
23 December 2024
SohoPlace
1.0 out of 5.0 stars
A new Christmas show has hit the West End this festive season, A Christmas Carol(ish) has transferred to SohoPlace two years after its development run at the Soho Theatre with a bigger, more sparkling production.
I’ll start off by saying, this show does feel like a fringe show that’s been inexplicably been transported onto a larger stage. It is unrefined and a bit of a mess, and definitely has an air of underdeveloped script ideas that aren’t quite ready for public consumption yet.
The stage design is the one saving grace for this production, starting with a huge golden curtain, later revealing a wall of wooden boxes and crates that is gorgeous and incredibly well used. However, that’s pretty much the only appealing part of this show.
Nick Mohammed’s comedy alter ego Mr. Swallow is Santa, who is also somehow Scrooge. He exploits his elves in his workshop and is incredibly grumpy, stressed by the seasonal demands when he decides that Christmas is cancelled. When he is visited by three ghosts, who are technically four ghosts who are also all the same ghost, will he change his mind and bring back the beloved holiday?
This is set up to be the main story line of the show, but is quickly derailed by very odd staging choices. From rehearsal and script development scenes that don’t really serve a purpose other than trying to be funny in a rehearsed ineptitude kind of way, these scenes feel unrefined and superfluous, derailing the story for a few laughs while being incredibly repetitive. The constant breaking of the 4th wall and Mr. Swallow’s insistence that he didn’t learn any of his lines nor read the script, quickly become boring and contrived in its ceaseless indulgence in self-referential jokes.
Scene changes are very slow, with long moments of silence while a darkened stage is rearranged, and the pacing of the show feels off, at times lingering on scenes for too long, at other times skipping through them entirely. The humour is very harsh and over the top, leading to it feeling forced and artificial, cheapening the use of quite emotional topics for a laugh at the expense of those affected.
The narrative itself is disjointed, leading to it feeling more like a variety sketch show than a cohesive story, forgetting that it is billed as A Christmas Carol for most of the duration of the performance. It’s a confused adaptation that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, indulging in side-bars and random short sketch scenes outside of the story itself. With dark and forced humour, mediocre songs, and unfunny variety performances, this show doesn’t quite know what it wants to be and needs to do less, it’s more of a whirlwind of random festive-adjacent ideas than a coherent story in itself. The unsophisticated humour includes a scene of Jesus’ birth with the baby’s head randomly rolling across the stage while inappropriate jokes are thrown in for good measure, more in line with the humour of a 12 year old at best. It keeps flogging the same jokes way past their expiration, before remembering that it was trying to be A Christmas Carol a few minutes before the end of the second act.
It’s just a confused, disjointed production that desperately needs to be workshopped again. A definite no from me.
