Mischief have brought us plenty of laughs over the years. Best known for The Play That Goes Wrong – which has now been running on the West End for over a decade, and is playing all around the world – they’ve also brought us Peter Pan Goes Wrong, The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, The Comedy About Spies and more besides. This festive season sees Christmas Carol Goes Wrong making its West End debut at London’s Apollo Theatre as part of a UK tour, which began last month at The Lowry in Salford; it will continue into the new year, with shows in Nottingham, Aylesbury, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Canterbury.
If you’re familiar with Mischief’s shows, you probably have a reasonable idea of what to expect: we’re in the (not very safe) hands of am dram group The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, who are adapting Charles Dickens’ beloved festive novel into a stage production. Cue two hours of battling egos, petty in-fighting, forgotten lines, missed cues and a preposterous lack of technical ability, which the players somehow manage to muddle through despite a series of mishaps which would trouble anyone with a passing interest in health and safety.
The play also, of course, spectacularly misses most of the key points of Dickens’ novel. Scrooge is not a changed man, if anything ending up angrier and more bitter; Tiny Tim is a towering, all-powerful monster; no-one is likely to learn any lessons from the hilariously camp slapstick comedy stylings of the ghost visitations. But then… would you have a Mischief show any other way? It does also bring everything you’d expect from a Christmas show to the table: carols, bells, fake snow – it’s choc-full of festive cheer.
If you’re already a fan of this production company, then chances are you’re already planning to see Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. If this is all new to you, then we’re pleased to report that this is terrifically good fun: it’s very mindless and silly, of course, but sometimes all we want is a good chuckle, and this charming show has laughs aplenty.
GAY TIMES gives Christmas Carol Goes Wrong – 4/5
More information can be found here.
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