As terrifying as it is, “the spirit world” that torments Joseph Ziegler’s Scrooge, in Soulpepper’s enthusiastically heartwarming A Christmas Carol, might be, ironically, a preferable fit for the man. The corporeal world, after all, is a pleasure-less place for him and he humbugs life, and its people, because he doesn’t know how to live it. He doesn’t join in because he is afraid and doesn’t know how to move among other people. He doesn’t know how to hear what they say. Still, more to the point, this Scrooge seems a man, via Ziegler, who senses perhaps that he might have a humane heart and the thought unsettles him.
Why? Not because he is just a mean and nasty guy, but because a heart is something alien that he can’t understand, he can’t control. It’s not numbers ink-written on a ledger, it’s not a coin in the hand, it’s not an employee or debtor he can bully into shape. A heart is something that might welcome intangible but demanding spirits of conscience and, in turn, lure one into the unknown. This Scrooge, however, invests his daring carefully and doesn’t speculate in stocks of the ethereal world. He wants to play it safe and so he blocks out people and the human warmth and imprecise values they imply with their kind words and deeds. It’s life he blocks out because he just doesn’t know how to get in.
Scrooge here is a man who handles metallic money and is appropriately a body of cold steel, one that stands like a “resolute” and unrelenting deity of inhumanity. He also suggests an inner pain, one that enrages him into meanness, shapes his rigid being. Note how alienated he seems when, with the Ghost of Christmas Past at his side, he attempts some high-kicking dance and in turn looks bewildered. There’s a poignant air of desperation in his awkwardness. Still, he is a classic mean shit or, according to Mrs. Cratchit, an “odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man” and Ziegler gives him a spiritually cancerous tone. And isn’t the greatest tragedy a man who isn’t connected to the potential of his own humanity. Appropriately, Ziegler is an actor of proportion and no excess, one whose every move hits the mark as it emerges subtly from abundant resources of human understanding. This is a very complex Scrooge.
Bob Cratchit, on the other hand, heartbreakingly underplayed by Oliver Dennis, is decency incarnate, a man of wounded tenderness, especially at the side of his dead son. One feels awed by his spontaneous and unforced goodness. The day to day sorrow in the eyes and manner of Bob and Mrs. Cratchit, the latter played with subtle sadness in her DNA by Deborah Drakeford, is deeply touching. Both have faces that tell lifetimes. Matthew Edison too gives a compelling layered performance as Mr. Fred and the younger actors, like Alyson MacFarlane, seem naturally attuned to their familial context and also to their individuality. Some are very young and we believe them all, whatever their respective ages.
If this Soulpepper production achieves the thrust of literary narrative (well, yes, of course) and tells a good tale, it is also fluidly balletic in its physical realization. Note the elasticity of movement, how the Harlequins especially weave like human threads, like strands of ethereal imagination, or how director Michael Shamata makes his dramatic points physically in, for example, Marley’s weighted steps that echo a weighed down soul. Others, feeling their quiet joy of existence move with sweeping and authoritative serenity. Shamata is a director who, with incisive economy, finds many brief means to emotional effect and often a simple gesture tells a chapter in this tale of Christmas. He and his actors create a world which we, the audience, easily inhabit with them.
This Soulpepper production of A Christmas Carol unfolds dynamically in simultaneous dimensions and that is one key to its charm and emotional appeal. We experience the worldly poverty of starving families and poorhouses, the turmoil of a messed up and tortured psychology in Scrooge, the beneficence of human kindness from many quarters, the magic of a very conceivable supernatural torment, the palpable and unembarrassed strength of innocence in an indifferent world, the profound beauty of love as we see it at the Cratchit Christmas table, the seductive spell of imagination using bodies and voices to speak like water or like stone.
And there’s the dancing, especially the grand physicality and insane joie de vivre of Kevin Bundy and Maggie Huculak swirling and leaping like potent and unstoppable forces of nature. Miss Huculak, with her red and white striped dress and whirlwind kicks as high as the sky, with her smile lit bright as three days of summer light, remains embedded in my mind as a living and breathing icon of joy. A Christmas Carol is certainly a profound tale of spiritual redemption that warms our hearts but, on a cold winter night, this lady joyfully explodes with primordial fire that tells us not how we should live, but why. That’s quite a potent antidote to the greedy and mean-spirited folk one will inevitably encounter, in due course, the next day as the world goes on.