Ignorance and Want the warning Dickens gives to his readers seems to be holding to his promise.
As we build the staged reading for Christmas Carol we look at the themes Dickens was trying to point out with his Christmas parable of the soul. The shocking,( or not too shocking evidence depending on how you look at it), is we have returned to a Victorian view of the world both in the physical and the mental state.
We seem to have developed a social amnesia concerning the structure of the world around us. We have the deserving and undeserving poor, we have large corporations and wealthy tycoons owning the bulk of what banks, stock market, business, do and run,in short a robber- baron structure. We have people working two or three jobs and still unable to keep food on their table.
True we do not have work houses, we have privately run prisons, and a sea of undocumented workers who have no refuge from what ever is doled out to them, and a growing number of homeless. Dickens would be right at home.
In his book he tries to show Scrooge the resilience of the human spirit no matter how down trodden they are, and that mankind could, and should do better.
His words, his language is what draws us to him; his ability to form a generation into almost bouffant style of the times. Boiling a people and a culture down to its essence.
There are hidden symbols in Christmas Carol, ones we try to address through the puppets. The Ghosts themselves are a conglomerate of symbols and signs all rolled into one. little secrets are revealed if you know what to look for, Fred the only offspring of Scrooges beloved sister is a happy content fellow,clearly in love with his wife. She is the upcoming hostess, but is unable to join in the party games and is never too long from her chair. It is the way Dickens talks of her we realize she is with child. A star on Scrooges future should he wish to join the human race.
What would a Scrooge of the 21century be like, would he be constantly on his phone and Pad never connecting to his fellow man? trading and trafficking in sub primes?
We are scratching the surface here and I hope that you are able to come and see what we have built. It is a Christmas Story for this generation, using a story from his generation, holding up his mirror to show us what has changed and what has sadly not.
Don’t take this to mean we have modernized the work, we have not, we keep it firmly in the Victorian era, we leave it to you to place it today.