The Old Vic's new production of A Christmas Carol doesn't shy away from drawing parallels with the poverty of Dickens' time and today
I first became aware of A Christmas Carol because of the BBC animation in the late 1960s or early '70s. I remember becoming fixated on it and obsessively drew the sequence when Scrooge returns to his office with the Scrooge and Marley sign. It was very, very atmospheric.
It's about duality, isn't it? Scrooge addresses that monster side of us all. And maybe as a kid, I was aware of that. Maybe the seeds of being an actor were sown then. It was about kindness or the absence of kindness and that chimed with me as a child, because as a kid I was always questioning my conscience and whether I was good or bad.
I watch every time there's a version of A Christmas Carol on film or television. This time last year, I wrote to the Old Vic directly and asked them why they had never thought of me for Scrooge. And now here we are.
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I think I bring energy and life experience to the role of Scrooge. As I've grown older and I've watched iterations of it, I've realised it is about a nervous breakdown. It is a condensed nervous breakdown that starts at approximately 7pm on Christmas Eve and ends at 7am on Christmas Day morning. So in the course of 12 hours, he goes through what I've been through in the last seven years – where I had the breakdown and I think I now feel fully recovered, if one ever can be.
Coincidentally, this is seven years after it happened to me, and Marley comes to Scrooge seven years after he dies. And this is the seventh production of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic. Not that I'm a numerologist, but there is a symmetry to it.
In the films, you have different actors playing old Scrooge and young Scrooge. But I get to play both. So it's a little bit Our Friends In The North, only you're switching, pivoting between the two within scenes. You're presenting the older man and the younger man – before the fall, after the fall, and then the return into innocence. So it's the role of a lifetime. And it's on at The Old Vic, where Charles Dickens witnessed theatre.
I do an RP accent, which has been exciting. I've had to age up and age down and I'm working with actors who are nearly all 25 or 30 years younger than me. They can not only act, they can sing and dance. And I can only act – and some people would question that – so it's really kicked my backside and kept me on my toes.
I've enjoyed leading the company. You have to do that onstage and offstage, and I like that – I was a kid that was captain of our football team, I like responsibility.
Christmas is very difficult for a lot of people. We know that domestic abuse and homelessness become all the more acute at Christmas. I'm divorced and decided last year, when I was missing my children over Christmas, that I need to be busy next time. So that's why I wanted to work over this period.
I also wanted to do this for my children. They've seen it. When I jumped off stage to wish the audience Merry Christmas, which is a part of the play, my children and my 91-year-old mum were sat right there, so I wished them all Merry Christmas as Scrooge, which was pretty meta. My daughter said, well, for once dad, I don't have any criticisms!
It's an odd experience. I'm not in any way a method actor, but you're acting redemption every single night. Scrooge becomes, to a certain extent, Father Christmas.
So you come off stage and your soul is adrenalised. I'm doing two shows today, so I'll be redeemed twice – and you've just got to be a bit careful with your ego and your energy levels and your euphoria. Oddly, it's easier to shake off Macbeth because you want to shake that off. With this, you really want to be the redeemed Ebenezer Scrooge – and 'honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year' – for the rest of your life. So it's easy to have your permanent redeemed Ebenezer goggles on and be this relentlessly positive arsehole, which is exhausting for other people.
I'm doing A Christmas Carol while the Covid inquiry is taking place. And I'm locating my Ebenezer Scrooge socially, culturally, and class-wise very much on that Conservative – well, you can't call it a government, more like a private members' club. That's what I'm playing. We talked a lot about current Conservative politicians in the characterisation, the way he sounds, his value system. It is so relevant. It could be any one of that cabinet. Scrooge is confronted with his conscience and acts on it. But they are without conscience and beyond redemption.
Dickens was famously inspired when he visited a poor house and that sowed the seeds for the story. It's a bit of propaganda. A sugary confection. But at its heart is a very angry condemnation of capitalism. I'm playing capitalism on stage every night on stage. And you cannot ignore that it is absolutely bang on for now, this argument that capitalism has gone as far as it can.
I don't know what the numbers were when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, but in this country there are now 12 million people living in poverty. I say that every night on stage – I make a speech at the end of the play and then we rattle a bucket and collect money for City Harvest. We have funded more than 290,000 meals already during this year's run.
It is beyond belief that, in a western democracy, these levels of poverty have to be addressed through charitable means rather than through governmental means. And it's a tiny drop in the ocean.
But I don't think an institution like The Old Vic could do a production like this and not address that issue. So we soften them up with the play then hit them with the bucket. We are making people happy and then we are asking people to cough up.
Christopher Eccleston stars in A Christmas Carol is on at The Old Vic, London, until 6 January 2024.
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