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A Christmas Carol, review: Simon Russell Beale raises the ghost of festive theatre past

A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol
  • Dirs: Jacqui Morris and David Morris. Cast: Michael Nunn, Jakub Franasowicz, Russell Maliphant, Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Mikey Boats, Grace Jabbari, Dana Fouras (dancers), Simon Russell Beale, Martin Freeman, Carey Mulligan, Daniel Kaluuya, Andy Serkis (voices), Sian Phillips (narrator). PG cert, 94 mins

With more than 40 live-action versions of A Christmas Carol already in the can, what the Dickens is left to be done with it? Sibling filmmakers Jacqui and David Morris, who directed 2018’s superb Nureyev documentary, have come up with a compelling new angle: a danced-through version of the fable, performed in a stage-like space by a specially convened troupe, and with the characters’ voices supplied by an all-star (though off-screen) cast.

The result is a mostly beguiling, intermittently jarring hybrid – much closer to “normal” cinema than, say, a straightforward screening of a play, but with a certain frisson of live-ness that works in its favour more often than not. Aimed squarely at families, it’s also one for children (and adults) who are already familiar with the original Charles Dickens novella – or, failing that, perhaps the immortal Alastair Sim and/or Muppets-led adaptations thereof.

The appeal of this new Christmas Carol is rooted in its own particular adaptational choices: the sets that resemble grisly, Gustave Doré-like etchings, or the intermingling of ballet and body-popping, all captured by a camera that weaves between the dancers like a ghostly understudy just as often as it withdraws to a more conventional vantage point in the stalls.

Siân Phillips plays the narrator, reading aloud from the original Dickens – or at least a well-whittled digest. The scene is a Victorian parlour, where two children are re-enacting the tale in their model theatre for their parents and younger sister, the latter of whom watches the whole thing come to life before her eyes.

It really takes off when Michael Nunn’s Scrooge, voiced by Simon Russell Beale with (intentional or otherwise) nods to Sim, returns to his gloomy suite of rooms and encounters Marley’s ghost – who is danced by Russell Maliphant and voiced by Andy Serkis with such harmonious, blood-curdling gusto that it almost justifies the film’s voice-and-body-splitting gambit in one fell swoop. Serkis is so good, in fact, that he makes you crave another live-action version in which he’s physically present – that is, in addition to last year’s Peaky Blinders-inflected BBC version, in which he played the Ghost of Christmas Past.

A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol

Martin Freeman also makes a convincing voice of Bob Cratchit, because of course he does, though alas, many of the other pairings just don’t mesh smoothly enough to prevent the device itself from feeling awkwardly conspicuous. Daniel Kaluuya doesn’t provide the jovial boom implied by Mikey Boats’s strapping Ghost of Christmas Present, while Carey Mulligan barely registers as the voice of Scrooge’s great lost love Belle, who is danced with great delicacy and warmth by Grace Jabbari.

In fact, the most effective sequences here tend to be the ones least driven by dialogue: Marley’s ghost wrestling with his chains; the foretold death of Tiny Tim; the energised ensemble bustle of the London streets. Immersive rather than absorbing, it’s a film that makes you pine for the theatre, where this kind of offbeat treatment tends to land with fewer bumps.

In cinemas now