Adrian Edmondson proves a joyously propulsive Scrooge in this lavish RSC revival

It’s 40 years to the day since Ade Edmondson winningly burst on to our screens as the cartoon-violent Vyvyan in The Young Ones, the ground-breaking sitcom about four male students living in self-created Dickensian squalor. My, time has flown. Now he takes centre stage at the RSC as Scrooge, aged archetype of Victorian miserliness brought to book by a triple-strength supernatural reckoning.

It’s a pleasure to report that the intervening decades haven’t fatally dimmed the comedian-turned-actor’s energy-levels. This is a joyously propulsive performance that stands comparison with the mutton-chopped best of them. All the snarling malevolence, haunted bewilderment and belated contrition-rich kindness, with rejuvenated sprightliness to boot, is present and correct. Is there something a touch Edmondsonian about those jerky movements and throttled diction? Yes, a ghost of caricature too, but that answers the need for comedy without short-changing the vital pangs of regret and remorse.

It’s just as well, though, that he’s uttering his “bah humbugs” relatively early. This year, there’s a surplus of Christmas Carols, as if in inverse relation to our debt-levels. The story is a coffer-filler for cash-strapped venues, and these familiar characters have a contemporary frisson too. Child poverty is up, even candlelight is back in, and how we look after number one, and others too, is more vexed than ever.

First seen in 2017, David Edgar’s adaptation, directed with dab-handed polish by Rachel Kavanaugh, has its cake and eats it. We get the requisite lavish spectacle, with all the trimmings: Christmas card-pretty evocations of a snow-flecked, fog-shrouded gloomy metropolis, complete with carol-singing and ghoulish thrills, and a cast size that wouldn’t disgrace a West End production of Oliver! But Dickens and his friend and editor John Forster are here part and parcel of the narrative, the author’s creative process and political rationale discussed as Gavin Fowler’s garrulous literary genius spirits up the page-turner in order to fulfil his outraged social justice mission.

That added interrogative layer to the theatrical figgy pudding does make things chewy at points. The running-time is over two hours – possibly fidget-inducing for younger viewers. But the understated virtue of the evening is that it treats the watching children as adults even as it advances the evergreen moral that to escape from life-hardened misanthropy we need to connect with our damaged but resilient inner child.

Next year, I do hope main-house programming will look less tried-and-tested – but that’s as much a comment on the state we’re in as a criticism of this crowd-pleasing, thought-provoking revenant.

Until Jan 1. Tickets: 01789 331111; rsc.org.uk