Written by Jason Solomons
Here’s yet another of these fanciful inventions spun like tinsel around the trunk of a classic work of art. We had it with Goodbye Christopher Robin (I certainly had it with that one) and then with Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Now it’s the turn of Charles Dickens.
The result is very entertaining, and just about possible. Dickens, played with the right mix of mania and mischief by Dan Stevens, has just returned from his tour of America. He’s been rapturously received over there, where Oliver Twist is a huge hit. But back home in London he’s got a growing brood of children and rapacious publishers eager for a success following apparently lukewarm reviews for Barnaby Rudge and Nicholas Nickleby.
Dickens lives in fear of debt and of being unproductive, mainly because of his father’s fecklessness. Dickens Sr is played with relish here by Jonathan Pryce, always about to write an article for The Spectator but never quite getting round to it and buying his grandchildren a pet raven instead.
Running out of money, besieged by a noisy household, and with a weakness for charitable causes, Dickens decides to come up with a hit and reckons Christmas is the ideal peg for it. Various mutton- chopped Victorian figures tut-tut and decry that Christmas is but a minor festival hardly observed by anyone these days. Depressed, Dickens resolves to go ahead anyway and publish his own novel, only he’s not really got a story.
So he wanders the streets of London observing various characters, such as a pinched old man in black burying his brother, grumbling about the waste of money and mumbling ‘humbug’. This figure is played by Christopher Plummer and Dickens will do mental battle with this character, who haunts his dreams. Then, when he’s having lunch at The Garrick, Dickens is served by a doddery, pale old waiter called Marley. And on it goes, as we watch with varying degrees of, ‘seriously’? There’s Dickens in his attic trying to come up with a character name: ‘Scrange, no... Screely, no... Scritch, no... Scrooge!’ Here’s Dickens overhearing the new nanny telling his kids an old Irish bedtime story about a ghost on Christmas Eve. Hmmm...
It could have been heavy-going but it’s all done with a lightness of spirit that makes for a literary jeu d’esprit, a bit like Shakespeare in Love but without the smarty-pants in-jokes. I liked the wit and the costumes very much, and Stevens has a ball with the part, contorting his body into Dickens’s caricature characters and doing the voices for his children, like a sort of Victorian Robin Williams.
While Morfydd Clark does her best with the put-upon part of Kate Dickens, there’s a big sentimental heart to it all, with the story of Tiny Tim. And as in
the best Dickens works, too, the minor characters are vividly drawn and make for good whiskery fun – from Miriam Margolyes as Mrs Fisk, Simon Callow as Leech and Miles Jupp as Dickens’s gloating rival William Makepeace Thackeray. I suddenly felt all festive. And, yes, it snows.
