A Christmas Carol (Photo: Craig Fuller)
When: 12th November – 22nd December 2018
Where: Touring across the UK
£: Ticket prices vary, depending on the venue
What is it?
Celebrating the 175th anniversary of the publication of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, European Arts Company return with their authentic and refreshing adaptation of this timeless tale.
Audiences will be welcomed into Dickens’s intimate study, a warm inviting environment full of festive cheer and hidden surprises. For the production, the set will be based on Dickens’s own London rooms and take inspiration from a rich tradition of Victorian illusion, imagination and early theatrical trickery. The production will use an original Victorian magic lantern in the show to help illuminate the story.
Few people know that Charles Dickens originally wanted to be an actor and A Christmas Carol was the first public performance he gave of his own work. After his opening night he said the success was most wonderful and prodigious. Dickens enacted the work over 150 times and the effect on the public was said to be phenomenal.
Remarkably, Dickens made more money from his readings than he did from all his novels and stories put together. This production, adapted from Dickens’s own public reading scripts and eyewitness accounts of him on stage, aims to recreate the spirit of Dickens’s original performances.
Dickens was passionately interested in the welfare of the poor, particularly children, and many of his early readings were for charity. Doctor Thomas Barnardo was a contemporary of Dickens and was inspired to set up his first Ragged School partly as a result of Dickens’ writings and campaigning. This tour is in aid of the children’s charity Barnardo’s.
Dickens will be played by actor John O’Connor who lives in Rochester where Dickens grew up and set many of his stories, including Great Expectations, David Copperfield and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
This Christmas, you can experience what it must have been like to be in the audience in the 1860s; and enjoy a seasonal treat in the spirit of Christmas past, present and future.
A Christmas Carol performance dates:
12th November at Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury
27th – 28th November at Greenwich Theatre Studio, London
29th November at Selby Town Hall, Yorkshire
30th November at Stantonbury Theatre, Milton Keynes
1st December at Quay Theatre, Suffolk
3rd – 4th December at Swindon Arts Centre, Swindon
5th December at Rondo Theatre, Bath
7th December at Dugdale Centre, London
8th December at Rochester Guildhall, Rochester
10th December at Mumford Theatre, Cambridge
11th – 12th December at Loughborough Town Hall, Loughborough
13th December at Rosehill Theatre, Whitehaven, Cumbria
14th December at Helmsley Arts Centre, Yorkshire
15th December at Malton Dickensian Festival, Yorkshire
18th – 22nd December at York Theatre Royal, The De Grey Rooms, York
More info: europeanarts.co.uk/next#tour-dates
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