5 December – 3 January
A young company in every sense, the award-winning Black Hound Productions, formed in 2016, features a youthful company who focus specifically on championing new writing through an experimental theatrical style. Following last year’s acclaimed Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Mystery, this year’s offering follows in the same vein by bringing a lesser-known festive tale to life. In this case, rather than a single Conan Doyle story, A Dickens Christmas weaves together narrative threads and characters from a combination of several of Boz’s less-recognised stories into a powerful and affecting performance.
1856’s The Wreck of the Golden Mary provides the narrative framing device: initially appearing in the festive edition of Dickens’ Household Words magazine, the story features a band of castaways who, stranded in a lifeboat in the mid-Atlantic, have survived the sinking of their as it ship sails to the New World and who turn to storytelling in their attempts to survive. Collaboratively, each of the survivors’ stories was written by other Victorian authors including, among others, Wilkie Collins.
Writer Patrick Withey directs a talented cast of three: Callum Lewis-Newman gives a highly engaging performance, initially as our narrator, the hard-drinking Captain William Ravender, haunted by a tragedy from his past. Sian E Green and Georgia Jackson complete the cast as Mr Rarx, the first mate, and Mrs Atherfield, a passenger with a secret of her own. Despite the budgetary restrictions and limited special effects of such a production, the “sinking” of the ship is a work of genius, the combination of slo-mo and Joe Owen-Pinkney’s superb use of sound and lighting in an impressive underwater scene creating a believable and gripping sense of peril, with the close confines of the lifeboat well-suited to the Irving Studio’s intimate space.
From here, three further narratives are told as the survivors exchange their stories. Clever and imaginative use is made of minimal props and costumes, a simple stepladder doubling as both the lifeboat and a Christmas tree, a simple flickering red light functions as a haunting distress flare, while the cast showcase their impressive versatility in a fast-paced carousel of further roles, presenting characters from three tales spanning twenty years of Dickens’ oeuvre: The Chimes (one of four festive tales which followed 1843’s A Christmas Carol), The Goblins Who Stole A Sexton (from 1836’s Pickwick Papers) and 1855’s The Holly Tree Inn. In an energetic and absorbing performance which runs to just under an hour, these tales may be significantly abridged, yet they are simply and beautifully told as Black Hound conjures, in their words, “a wintry world full of ghostly apparitions, redemptive reckonings and unlikely camaraderie.”
A haunting and beautiful refrain from In the Bleak Midwinter echoes through the production too, the festive and redemptive cheer of A Christmas Carol largely exchanged for an exploration of deeper and more powerful themes of hope and humanity. Yet A Dickens Christmas beautifully conveys the very essence of this celebrated writer, the master storyteller who, with these tales within a tale, reveals the resilience of the human spirit and our need for stories in order to survive.
★★★★☆ Tony Clarke, 7 December 2025
