PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Windmill Hill City Farm, Bristol (Tue 6-Sat 10 Dec)

THEATRE If, Sir or Madam, you have yet to hear of Ebenezer Scrooge, then Bah! to you and to you. Now, either pay attention to the updated premise for ‘A Christmas Carol’, or be boiled in your own pudding…

‘Scrooge on The Farm’ finds our eponymous miser a self-confessed bitch of Thatcher, a property developer planning to raze the farm to make way for another pointless building that will do Bristol proud and lie empty with bricked-though windows. He gags at ‘community’ as though choking on a ‘nut loaf’ made by the local yummy mummies he scorns: “I love your cries of middle-class alarm.”

We’re at Windmill Hill City Farm, established 35 years ago, the first of its kind outside London and now emerging from a two-year struggle of survival. So it is well-placed to mirror the principles of social reformer Dickens: education, charity, home. Of course, ‘A Christmas Carol’ was written in 1843 and has been in print ever since. It’s a story so familiar and variously told that it carries its own rewritten nativity: the wise men are replaced by three spirits; the child in the manger is now Tiny Tim.

This torchlight version by Darkstuff Productions begins with Anna Westlake’s narrator literally guiding us into the story. Scrooge, on being accosted by a perky charity mugger, asks: “Do we not have Job Centres? Do we not have Social Services?” – a neat allusion to the original prisons, workhouses and Poor Law scene. Although this is a contemporary parable – we sit on hay bales while Scrooge stares into his laptop – the story is still associated with extravagant melodrama and rich language-bling. What we get instead is some laudable PR from farmworker Trevor (John Winchester) and a bit of discourse on profit versus people. To be fair, it’s difficult to concentrate on earnestly-played characters when they are being inevitably upstaged by silent and strangely adorable goats under a starry sky.

Anna Girvan directs the episodic set pieces with a light touch, which for the most part works. However, there needs to be some juxtaposed menace and this may come when pace, lines and cues are picked up. There’s a nervous lead performance, with Scrooge’s scepticism remaining mere sarky aside for too long, resulting in the magic never quite happening, and a couple of the songs feel shoehorned into the narrative. Ian Kane has a presence that lifts the scenes in which he appears, particularly a subtle turn as the Spirit unpacking Scrooge’s past like a Freudian analyst.

Arguably the best character, though, is the amazing setting. Yes, the show has charm; yes, it’s a bit under-rehearsed and rough around the edges; yes, after two hours in near freezing temperatures, you will clap along to that Slade song, just to get the feeling back into your extremities. But if you’re already cheesed-off with the humbuggery of seasonal gluttony, you could do worse than support a promenade play from a company that clearly just wants to make theatre. In short, Sir or Madam, if you crave the – frankly rare – opportunity to follow a mean old banker and his shrink in a conga past the pig pens, then do attend. If not: bleat, squeal and indeed Bah! to you and to you. (Kerry Hood)

Copyright Kerry Hood 2011