REVIEW: A Christmas Carol – Platform, Glasgow
Never known as the merriest of festive tales, A Christmas Carol proves to be a joyless offering at Platform this year.
Lewis Hetherington has reset the tale firmly in the present day. Carol Scrooge owns a fashion company Carol’s Clothes. Here she relentlessly tortures her downtrodden employees, paying them a pittance and working them to exhaustion. On Christmas Eve, the thoroughly dislikeable Carol (Sarah McCardie) is shown the error of her ways by The Christmas Ghost (Scott Miller), finally allowing a little love into her heart and saving Bob Cratchitt’s (Adam Buksh) teeny tiny turtle (yes, turtle, who is so tiny he’s hard to see from the back of the auditorium) Tiny Shiny Tim from a certain death.
Staged on Claire Halleran’s moving box set, the entire production lacks any joy. From the brown and black striped colour scheme, the lacklustre costumes to the musical choices, it is baffling how anyone involved failed to see the utter lack of appeal to it’s target audience. It is slow to start, with much talk of commerce and profit and loss and it never gets out of first gear. It overplays the moral message and the script doesn’t just fly over the heads of the young audience it is positively soaring in the stratosphere.
The cast work hard and their energy is evident with Adam Buksh’s Bob Cratchitt proving to be the most appealing and Kate Bonney’s lighting is gorgeous throughout.
It gives me no pleasure to write this review, this is a venue I love with a festive show I never miss, but the sheer lack of any merriment or joy is just baffling. The audience, mainly primary-age children, sat in virtual silence for the show’s entirety (save for copious toilet trips, which I suspect were more due to boredom as the running time comes in at around an hour). There was nary an opportunity for audience participation and the choice of music, which might have enlivened both the production and the audience was grim. The only exclamations of joy came at the bows when the artificial snow machine was cranked up.
I left more with a feeling of disappointment for the young children whose one chance at a festive show was this and hope that it doesn’t sour them from future theatre experiences.
