A CHRISTMAS CAROL at the Noel Coward Theatre - a Christmas Present from the Past?

As we inched closer to The Big Day it seemed very timely to see Patrick Barlow's new stage version of Charles Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL at the Noel Coward Theatre.  I must admit that I primarily went to finally have the opportunity to see Jim Broadbent onstage.

It was all a bit of a curate's egg but it was worth it for Broadbent and Samantha Spiro who played several small roles.

Barlow has adapted a fairly traditional retelling of the Dickens classic but his Scrooge when we first see him is not the usual dessicated old misery but a hearty and overbearing money-lender, in line with the now-received idea of heartless bankers.  The play starts with him putting a woman through the mill before she agrees to his exorbitant interest rates.

With that we get to the main story when Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley warning him to change his ways or he too will spend the afterlife in misery.  His visits from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future see to it that by Christmas morning he is a changed man.

The whole play takes place within a large toy theatre proscenium arch with two stagehands trundling props into place for the play to continue with the supporting cast of two actors and two actresses playing all the other parts, meeting themselves going off as they are coming on.

Broadbent was as good as I expected him to be and was particularly fine at the end of the play when his bluff and terror gave way to a sweet humility and as I said, of the supporting cast, the standouts were Amelia Bullmore as the ethereal Ghost of Christmas Past and Mrs Cratchitt but in particular Samantha Spiro commanded the stage as the Babs Windsor-style Ghost of Christmas Present among others.  She also gave a very good curtain speech for the St. Martin-In-The-Fields homeless charity.

But the overwhelming cutesy tweeness of the production was a bit unrelenting and the jokey script happily ignored the story's more haunting aspects towards the end which would have helped to vary the tone.

DI AND VIV AND ROSE (and us) at the Vaudeville Theatre

Last Wednesday it was time to step back in time thanks to Amelia Bullmore's comedy of three female friends negotiating life in DI AND VIV AND ROSE at the Vaudeville Theatre.

The play has transferred from Hampstead Theatre to the Vaudeville in the West End for a limited season - sadly without a title change which I think is unnecessarily cumbersome.  What has happened is the cast has had a two-thirds change since Hampstead: out goes Anna Maxwell Martin and Gina McKee, in comes Samantha Spiro and Jenna Russell.

If you know the individual actresses, you can imagine how this will change the dynamic of the play as Spiro and Russell, with their musical experience, play it more 'out front', more West End - and that is certainly not a bad thing in my book.

As good as the actresses are, I must admit that at no time did I find Bullmore's characters at all believable as they seemed to be types rather than fully-rounded characters, sporty lesbian, sex-mad ditz, driven fashion-writer career woman.

The set-up is age-old: three women from different backgrounds come together - here in a shared student flat - and we watch as they slowly evolve into genuine friends despite everything that life - and themselves - can do to them.

We first meet the threesome taking turns on their halls of residence phone, slowly getting to know each other and eventually sharing a flat together.  Over the course of the first act we get to know them too: Tamzin Outhwaite is Di, sporty and taking business studies who can finally admit to the world she is a lesbian after hiding it at home, Jenna Russell as Rose who is studying art history and whose good nature includes sleeping with any man she fancies, and Samantha Spiro is Viv who is studying sociology with a particular interest in how fashion has literally shaped women's lives.

Twice during the play Bullmore delivers a twist to the general sitcom feel, confronting her characters - and the audience - with the casual shocks that life can spring.  The first comes so out of the blue that it takes you totally unawares and the play violently changes gear for a while as the women bond together, only for the former tempo of fairly long scenes to creep back again by the interval.

The interval arrives at the end of their University years and they handle this last scene very well as the realization dawns that, although they are now firm friends, they will never share the experience of living together again. The 80s give way to the 90s and Viv is working for a fashion columnist in New York, Di is living with a partner and Rose is a single mother of two children.

I enjoyed these scenes more - the actresses seemed more comfortable playing ages closer to their own - although I also felt that Bullmore didn't really flesh out the characters that are left offstage, partners are mentioned but you never get a real sense of them.  Midway through the second act, Bullmore pulls the rug out from under the audience again with the death of one of the characters and the tempo changes again to one of loss and recrimination.

I was vaguely reminded of MY NIGHT WITH REG in these final scenes as it too covers the impact of a friend's death on those left behind, who has ownership of what memory, etc. but Kevin Elyot's play works on a more profound level than this one.

What made the play stand out were the performances of the fine actresses, in particular Samantha Spiro as the waspish, and later, soused Viv.  What is also good is seeing a new play that affords three equally prominent roles for actresses, I am sure the play will have a future life as it would be very easy to tour.

Briskly directed by Anna Mackmin, ultimately what's not to love about a production that gives you blasts of Kirsty MacColl *and* Madonna?