A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Tue 14 - Sat 18 December 2004 at 7.30pm and Sat 18 at 2.30pm
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Sheep Street, Northampton

Photo gallery

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, when he was 31 years old and already a popular and successful novelist, with The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop published in serialised form.

His early training as a reporter and journalist had given him a passionate ‘interest in the social conditions of his time, and in particular the plight of the urban poor who lived in the squalid slums of London.

In the summer of that year he visited a "ragged school" in Field Lane, and wrote "I have seldom seen, in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of body and soul exhibited in these children.

Three weeks later he made a speech in which he claimed that "ignorance itself was the most prolific parent of misery and crime" and urged that employers and the employed should come together to share a mutual duty and responsibility.

The themes of the common good (voiced by Scrooge's nephew in the first scene) and the family virtues of harmony and affection, run through the story.

It also contains many elements which relate directly to Dickens‘s personal life: his unhappiness as a child when his parents were sent to a debtors‘ prison, his own mounting debts and family commitments, the death of his beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth in 1837 and the increasing strain of the relationship with his wife Kate, which was to end in scandal and divorce in 1857.

Some critics have seen in the character of Scrooge echoes of Dickens‘ own struggle to find happiness and a meaningful place in the social and literary life of his time.

A Christmas Carol is this year’s seasonal offering from Masque Theatre.

Charles Dickens’s famous story about the transformation of embittered skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge into a warm and kindly benefactor has been frequently adapted for stage, film and television and Masque have chosen playwright John Mortimer’s version because they feel it retains so much of Dickens’s language and his host of memorable characters.

There are more than 50 named roles played by a cast of 25 who also act as storytellers, commentators and memorable characters.

The haunting atmosphere is the 900-year-old Crusader Round of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Sheep Street, where the production is being staged, is the perfect setting for the Ghosts of Jacob Marley, Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, to guide Scrooge through a journey towards personal redemption and a happy ending.