Review: A Christmas Carol, one-actor by Bernadette Nason
by Michael Meigs
Austin Playhouse provides an atmospheric little set for Bernadette Nason's telling of A Christmas Carol, and she's in costume when she enters primly from the single door at upstage right. Nason smiles an acknowledgment of us as she hangs up coat and scarf, then turns to address us.
From that point the story takes over, for Bernadette delivers Dickens' quick-moving, vivid text with crisp assurance and deft, economical mime. No exaggerations or mugging here; a shift of the shoulders, a roughening of the voice, a glint in the eye and she creates Ebenezer Scrooge in our minds, not in pantomime on the stage. Hers is the opposite of a bravado performance. She invites us into the fable, sketches the characters, and articulates the text with such precision and relish that we realize for the first time that Dickens has created a prose poem.
Yes, it's a morality play, and a powerful one. One may question the enthusiasm of those who propose that this short creation, which runs barely an hour in Nason's re-telling, gave shape to the English and eventually to the American celebration of the holiday, with gifts and roast meats and hearty family gathering. After all, the bleak mid-winter has been since pagan times a period for huddling together and sharing, and early church fathers had good reason to set the Christmas story at that season of the year.
Dickens reaches into that tradition and tells a story of error, redemption, family, charity and Christian conversion with barely a mention of the religious shape of the holiday. Scrooge is a Malthusian, sneering at the poor of the earth as "the surplus population" and he's a thorough materialist. The visits of those three secular spirits bring him back to family -- to his own, to that of the Crachetts and to the greater family of general humanity -- by examining his life, contemplating his death and attaching his sentiment to one tiny crippled boy.
Everyone knows a Scrooge, for Scrooge is Everyman; there's a lot of Scrooge in all of us.
The delight in this story and especially in Bernadette Nason's delivery of it is the lightness and the speed with which Dickens delivers those themes. Bernadette is using the script that Dickens himself abridged for presentation during his tours in Britain and in the United States. The narrator's voice is matter of fact, the story is not burdened with the glacial blocks of description so common in Dickens' novels, the characters speak in distinctive voices and the visiting spirits bring our recalcitrant protagonist to witness scenes rather than simply to hear homilies.
Nason becomes all this. She never reads from a book, as suggested by the winsome photo. She and director Lara Toner move the narrative with lively dispatch about that simple multi-level playing space, so there's no impression of lecture or pulpit. Bernadette with her expressive face and sweet, clear English accent has the unimposing charm of a gamine, a young and playful woman, a presence that makes all the more impressive the range of characters she creates. They're all here -- skinflint Scrooge, meek Bob Crachett, Scrooge's bounding nephew Fred, the two quite distinct old gentlemen soliciting charity, each of the Crachett children, three spirits of Christmas and a goodly crowd of others.
Nason presents the story in the Larry L. King theatre, a compact space at the north side of Austin Playhouse. The location provides the advantage of the intimacy of a story-telling space but the early momentary disadvantage of sound spill from the main stage -- some of Nason's opening passages, important to establishing the complicity between teller and audience, were punctuated by distant shouts and applause as Don Toner conducted a pre-show ticket auction at the main stage.
That disturbance was momentary. Perhaps it served as well to remind us that with the December 19 winter gala, the ongoing silent auction, vigorous funding appeals and the programming at the Larry L. King stage, Austin Playhouse is mobilizing support for its project of moving to permanent proprietary quarters at the Mueller development just off airport road.
That acquisition promises fair to guarantee continued offerings of quality on a level with this tidy, charming Christmas Carol and the thoughtful Horton Foote piece A Trip to Bountiful, next door.
EXTRA
Click to view program for A Christmas Carol presented by Bernadette Nason at Austin Playhouse
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A Christmas Carol, one-actor, by Bernadette Nason
by Charles Dickens, interpreted by Bernadette Nason
Bernadette Nason
