Locked away in the attic, you’ve neglected to eat, to sleep, or to be with your family. WALTER: Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack!ĭICKENS: No livestock is permitted in these quarters.ĬATHERINE: Charles, you’ve been at the page for three days. Walter, you cannot go through life relying on poultry as a means of communication. MARY: I want my doll’s nubbly nose all better.ĭICKENS: It’s embarrassing I’m a novelist and one of my own children refuses to speak the Queen’s English. Will you kiss it?ĭICKENS: The doll is fine, Mary. You miss your father, don’t you children?ĭICKENS: I know what you’re doing Catherine, using the children to woo me from my work will not win the day.ĬATHERINE: Are you joining us for supper?īOZ: Papa, we want you to sing carols with us. Dickens, find a little patience in your heart, they’re here to remind themselves what their father looks like. MARY carries her doll followed by a very pregnant CATHERINE.)ĬATHERINE: Mr. This must be distinctly understood or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail! Door, door, door, doornail-doorbell-door-mouse-door-what! I might have been inclined to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of iron in the trade, but back to the point I started from. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know what there is particularly dead about a doornail. (He writes.) Marley was dead: to begin with. (Pours a drink and toasts.) To the death of the dead-line…dead, dead-wait a tick. Having lived in England for a decade as well as directing and appearing in multiple productions of A Christmas Carol, Steven Young brings this experience to bear in this version of the story.ĭICKENS: I wish! (Beat.) There isn’t a ghost of a chance of making the 19 December deadline. Dickens has the final line quoting Tiny Tim and producing a bit of Christmas magic, capturing the original intention of why the author conceived this tale. The adaptation also pinpoints theatrical shifts as a guide to uninterrupted storytelling and allows for period and seasonal music to be chosen and developed by the ensemble.
This allows a continuous, almost cinematic flow to the action, unencumbered by long blackouts or awkward scene changes.
Theatrically viable: By retaining portions of the narrative, the focus goes to the author when any major costume or scenic changes are to be executed. Interspersed through the adaptation we see Dickens and Katherine spar until by the end of the tale, Dickens experiences a similar conversion as Scrooge and begs his family’s forgiveness. In danger of losing his home and his wife-currently pregnant with their fifth child-we meet the author, his family and witness the strain associated with the holiday season and an empty pocket.ĭickens has a conversion similar to Scrooge: Desperate to finish the novel in time to hit the Christmas market, the author demands his family absent themselves and then drives them from his attic writing chamber. Without paying out of pocket for the book’s production, his current publisher will not back A Christmas Carol. The American tour is a financial flop and his novels are being plagiarized. Three serials in a row fail to sell including his most recent Martin Chuzzlewit. As A Christmas Carol is penned, Charles Dickens is nearly bankrupt. We meet Dickens amid the creation of his legendary novel. Based on the novel by Charles Dickens and adapted with additional dialogue by Steven Young.