DICKENS IN RIOTOUS RHYME AND BAGPIPES – ON TOUR
Wouldn’t be right to get through December without Dickens, would it? But I have seen the magnificent Old Vic adaptation by Jack Thorne three times now, and don’t seem to find Simon Callow on rumbling through the story anywhere. So I crept through sodden lanes in a gale to drop in on Chris Green and Sophie Matthews, whose leftie Good King Wenceslas I so approved a year or two back (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-need-more-than-good-king-wenceslases-c07knplnb).
For it’s a big tour, and , accompanied by Jude Rees and her melodiously gorgeous oboe, they propose to sing the whole thing at us: Scrooge, Marley, back-story, triple-ghosting and a Fezziwig party so festive it involved two separate bagpipe attacks from Sophie. All in 55 spirited minutes after the break.
But the fact that it’s a lovely show is not least because a first half beforehand offers Christmas songs which Dickens himself would have known: with musette pipes, melodion, flute, oboe, guitar and keyboard we hear among other songs a wassail, a fascinatingly different Holly and Ivy, the Sans Day Carol, a coyly naughty music-hall song about mistletoe behaviour, and best of all a glorious “Time to Remember the Poor” , from the 17c collector Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, author of Onward Christian Soldiers.
They all sing, Green plays guitar, keyboard and a big fat thing apparently called a mandocello; Matthews has her flute and various bagpipes, and Jude Rees the oboe (least duck-squeaky oboe I have ever heard, very beautiful) and picks up an occasional melodeon.
The Dickens tale itself is neatly rendered into rhyme, using carol tunes (a lot of God Rest Ye Merry, since that is the one the boy sang outside Scrooge’s house) and familiar folktunes, with lovely woodwind interludes for the poor old miser’s sleep, and a mournful oboe carrying his nostalgic memories of a more innocent youth. It is nicely paced on the whole – good musical shocks, transitions to match the story – and Green uses all the eloquebt Dickens words which fit best into the fast-moving narrative. A simple thing, and rather lovely. Even if you think you’re not a folkie… Happy Christmas all.
On tour till 23/ 12 – LINK BELOW
(Leicester tonight, then Wallasey, Sale, IoW, Southampton and others till 23/ 12 )
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