Watching Guy Retallack's affecting one act version of Charles Dickens's story at the Bridge House (Fringe) Theatre in Penge, I was given to thinking how such nineteenth-century stories become timeless over the years and appeal to such a broad section of people. They are popular the world over. Scrooge is not simply a British Victorian archetype, he (or she) figures in most cultures, can be understood as emblematic of many societies.
I was reminded of the world appeal of such stories when I visited Haworth parsonage in Yorkshire a couple of years ago. Home to the Bronte sisters, the house backs on to a graveyard which could have been a Hammer Horror film set. Especially on a misty, cold, wet, dark November afternoon. The lady who served me in the tourist shop was Japanese and had developed a love of Wuthering Heights when she first read it in Tokyo as a child. Her life's mission was to travel to Yorkshire and live as close to the story's source as possible. From that story she gained an indescribable sense of personal valorisation. Here she is now, twenty years later, smiling sweetly and selling me a guide to Haworth.
The Penge production of A Christmas Carol - professional, well-acted, expertly directed - is one of millions produced over the years the world over. There is something ultimately very moving and thought-provoking about its ability to stir profound emotion and make us reflect of the mean-ness of mankind and its redemptive opportunities. But the Scrooge we remember is not the redeemed transformed person: it is the selfish, inward-looking miser who alienates himself gradually from life itself until life, in its more powerful forms, literally comes back to haunt him. It is the memory of this Scrooge which fuels our imaginations and ensures the survival of this ever-new, ever-engaging fable.
No comments:
Post a Comment