Scrooge’s Christmas

Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

A Christmas Carol

gets the comedy treatment in

Scrooge’s Christmas

, resident at the Pavilion Theatre for the pantomime season. Replacing the traditional fairytale framework with Dickens’s well-loved seasonal tale, this Ulster Theatre Company production may seem to have pretensions to more sophistication than the average panto. Not so. There are enough luminous yellow wigs, cross-dressing dames, slapstick knockabout and boo-hissable villains to dismiss any such fears of highbrow entertainment.

Elroy Ashmore gives Victorian London the acid treatment with his cartoon design, the palette of neon pink and orange shop-fronts playfully referencing other Dickens novels. Indeed, Dickens’s canon provides writer Michael Poynor with easy access to a whole wealth of literary puns too, although many of the jokes, on this viewing, fell flat. As did Mark Dougherty’s original compositions, which provide the staple pantomime score but fail to yield any familiar musical references for the audience. Instead, the songs are used for exposition of the story. However, the lyrics are difficult to follow, and the compositions themselves are just not engaging enough to get the audience responding to the music in traditional pantomime form (singalong participation).

Poynor makes original contributions to Dickens’s story too, inventing new characters, such as Lilly Marley (Marley’s widow and Scrooge’s housekeeper). Joe Rea cross-dresses to give us the production’s panto dame, but Poynor, directing, fails to take advantage of this stock role – Lilly might as well have been played by a woman as a man.

Other inventions revolve around the storyline. Thus, Marley is not really dead and the Christmas Eve haunting is merely a trick played by Scrooge’s disgruntled employees and relatives as an act of revenge. This makes the production’s true third haunting extremely scary, but, as my nine-year-old companion suggested (nine-year-olds are incredibly astute when it comes to plot holes), Scrooge’s transformation is just unbelievable. Charles Dickens would be thoroughly appalled.

Perhaps this takes the pantomime a little too seriously, and to give it credit, the Ulster Theatre Company deliberately avoids many of the more common commercial tricks in favour of a traditional style. However, there is neither enough substance nor fun in Scrooge's Christmasto pull it off.

Until Sun, Jan 17