For the past three years, Simon Callow’s critically-acclaimed production of Charles Dickens’ classic festive tale, A Christmas Carol, has wowed sold-out audiences. This year’s production is bound to be a sell-out, too, but don’t fret. If you miss tickets to the hit show, you will have another opportunity to see it as it’s heading to cinemas in December.
On Tuesday 11 December the stage-to-film adaptation, reimagined especially for cinema, will be released in 444 cinemas across the UK and Ireland by leading event cinema distributors CinemaLive.
Based on Charles Dickens’s own performance adaptation, Simon and director Tom Cairns have created a one-man cinematic extravaganza of festive storytelling that is both heart-warming and deeply moving.
About the cinematic adaptation, Simon said “When Tom Cairns and I started working on our one-man version of A Christmas Carol, we were very excited by the possibilities of putting the audience in direct contact with Dickens, who is even more vividly present in it as a narrator than in his other books, he climbs into your head, he is always by your side, the master conjuror and also the commentator. As we worked on the show, right from the beginning we saw that it might make a wonderful film, quite different from the stage show, drawing the viewer even more closely into contact with the story-teller, using the matchless poetic resources of the camera to summon up the many worlds through which Dickens takes us and the miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. Shot entirely in an abandoned warehouse, it takes the viewer indoors and outdoors, through the seasons and across the haunted city of London. The theatre version is pure theatre, the film, pure cinema, proving how phenomenally rich this favourite of all Christmas stories is.”
In the one-man stage adaptation, the audience is taken on a man’s astonishing journey through his past, his present and (terrifyingly) his future, led by his three ghostly guides. Will Ebenezer Scrooge, tight-fisted, cruel and bitter, finally re-join the human race and learn to embrace the truly generous and humble spirit of Christmas?
Tickets to the stage production at the Arts Theatre are still available. You can see Simon Callow in A Christmas Carol from 8 December to 12 January.