Scrooge time

A Christmas Carol

By Robert von Stein Redick

A Christmas Carol shows through December 24 at Portland Stage Company, (207) 774-0465.

MEAN OLD BASTARD: Davies reprises Scrooge.

A bit of general advice about A Christmas Carol: don’t see it every year. Like The Nutcracker, or It’s a Wonderful Life, or certain kinds of cholesterol, the body can process only so much before harmful deposits begin to collect. Art should quicken our pulse, not clog our arteries — and Dickens’s little fable is art, of an ancient and priceless sort. It is a fairy tale: an elementary story of magical events, with a sledgehammer of a moral. When it appeared in London in December of 1843, it was also a radical humanitarian appeal on behalf of England’s poor, and particularly her children. Dickens wrote the novel over just six weeks, in a state of nervous exhaustion accompanied by all-hours prowls through miles of London streets. Towards the end, when friends sought to draw him out on the project, he wept and laughed uncontrollably.

If we are not benumbed by December’s annual march of Scrooges, Cratchits, and ghosts over screen and stage, we may remain susceptible to this reckless and crusading spirit. Without it, there’s little more to A Christmas Carol than the comforts of familiarity, and a somewhat guilty nod to the golden rule, and both of these may be had more cheaply on video.

So much for my critique of the ritual. It is reassuring, however, to be reminded that theater is always more reckless than print (or film), inasmuch as no two productions of a play ever manage to be precisely the same. The third time we see Capra’s movie, it is stale; but new Hamlet’s have set hearts pounding every few years for the last five centuries. In the case of director Anita Stewart’s A Christmas Carol, that spark of ever-renewed life crackles steadily throughout.

Certainly Aled Davies, in his third Scrooging for the Portland Stage Company, shows no sign of creative fatigue. Carol actually concerns three Scrooges: before, during, and after the scrivener’s midnight joyrides with helpful ghosts. The good and bad Scrooges are mirror images, improbably pure in their opposed moralities, and Davies dishes these up with superlative energy. He does not merely scatter urchins with his walking stick; he lunges at them in a wild rage, humbugging to bring the house down. Even at his desk, hunchbacked and cringing as the old man of the sea, he stamps Bob Cratchit’s pay slips with violence enough to make us wince. Athleticism and arthritis may never have been more persuasively conjoined.

But stories are found between bookends, after all. The middle Scrooge, the transforming Scrooge, is at once less colorful and more interesting, and this fellow is rather too tightly squeezed between the saint and the sinner. Nasty scrooge never puts up a fight. To be fair, he struggles only a little more in Dickens’s novel, and the reader, like the theater patron, may be excused for thinking that one injection of ghostly counsel might have done the work of three.

The spirits earn their stage time, however. Christmas Past (N. Rose Liberace) is an angelic figure in a white ball gown; she moves like a fey and weightless thing, and her eyes are heavy with foreknowledge when she looks at Scrooge. As Christmases Present and Future, Liberace is less challenged, but no less satisfying.

But the night’s most delectable and gothic moment belongs to Charles Michael Howard as the ghost of Jacob Marley. Howard has a flair for lunatics, but who could have expected so quirky, so outlandish a ghost, who snatches his host’s bowl of gruel and devours it before he utters a sound? When he does, the author’s call for “a dismal and appalling noise” is done thorough justice, and so is Dickens’s moral indignation when Scrooge reminds the ghost that he was always a good man of business. “Business!” Marley howls, livid. “Mankind was my business! The common welfare was my business! The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Children are Dickens’s preferred expression of the “common welfare,” and as such they pop up everywhere. They are uniformly professional, these beaming sprites and ragamuffins, well coached in voice and bearing. It is a bit hilarious to see two of these charmers peek from Christmas Present’s robes in the symbolic roles of Ignorance and Want: Dickens feared those two afflictions above all others, believing they could bring civilization to ruin; in his novel he paints them as a boy and girl turned “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,” and adds, “no perversion of humanity, in any grade . . . has monsters half so horrible and dread.” Nobody’s darlings, these; yet PSC’s were cute enough. I also searched in vain for a few non-Anglo faces in the ensemble, to lend a note of inclusiveness to the fairy tale. Nothing doing.

But I would sooner drape myself in Marley’s chains than impugn the talents of these child actors. Their performances alone remind us how to experience the fable: not as a drowsy December obligation, but as a meeting with our better angels, however we choose to identify them. Let the ensemble, and all of Stewart’s team, rejoice in a Carol well and warmly done. n

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.