'A Christmas Carol' review — John Simm brings dry humour to Dickens's tale of redemption

Read our review of A Christmas Carol, adapted by Jack Thorne and starring John Simm, now in performances at the Old Vic through 4 January 2025.

It’s been nearly 20 years since John Simm lit up the small screen as a time-travelling police officer in BBC series Life on Mars. This Christmas, he also revisits the past as Ebenezer Scrooge in Jack Thorne’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which is now a cherished, festive fixture at London’s Old Vic.

Since 2017, a host of actors have taken on the role of Charles Dickens’s miserly Scrooge, including Rhys Ifans, Stephen Mangan, and just last year, former Doctor Christopher Eccleston. While our critic in 2023 described Eccleston as “withered and zombie-like, inclined towards silent, simmering resentment”, Simm’s classic Scrooge is proud, impatient, and pompous, prone to bellowing at those around him. Rob Howell’s set boxes him into his own prison, as door frames rise from the floor, creaking like the gallows. Scrooge quite literally hides his money under the floorboards, thanks to some carefully crafted wooden cash boxes.

However, signs of his redemption arc are established early in Matthew Warchus’s pacy production, with the Ghost of Christmas Past delving into his memories, including an innocent childhood playing with prized toys and a touching meet-cute moment with his sweetheart — and moral compass — Belle (played by a delightfully punchy Juliette Crosbie).

Simm cuts through plenty of the bleakness with dry humour. When the ghost of Scrooge’s deceased business partner Jacob Marley enters, wrapped in sinister, binding chains that trail the length of Howell’s traverse stage, he is told that three spirits will haunt him, and replies casually “I would rather not be.” Later, when a casket is rolled on to the stage, he says deadpan: “This is not such an unusual future.”

The production is further lifted by a strong supporting cast, including Rob Compton, returning for a second year as the humble, servile Bob Cratchit, and Georgina Sadler as Scrooge’s late sister — the sweet as treacle Little Fan, who delivers some hard truths as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Special mention goes to the heart-stealing Vinnie Stone, one of four young actors to alternate the role of Tiny Tim.

This adaptation of Dickens’s novella offers up a hard-hitting message about moral accountability — one that is driven home by the Old Vic’s fundraising commitment to the production, raising more than £1 million in the past seven years. But it also revels in a joyous Christmas spirit. On arrival, audience members are greeted by the smell of warm mince pies, the sounds of a string band playing festive music, and a canopy of lanterns. The surprises snowball, quite literally, from there, with falling snow, parachuting Brussels sprouts, and even a smoking turkey soaring from one side of the auditorium to the other.

Thorne, who is also behind West End phenomena Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Stranger Things: The First Shadow, creates a similar sense of magic and spectacle in his A Christmas Carol. Hopefully it will remain on the Old Vic stage for many years to come.

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Photo credit: John Simm and Georgina Sadler in A Christmas Carol at The Old Vic. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)