Theatre review: Christmas Carol Goes Wrong

London's latest version of Charles Dickens' (Chickens to his friends) A Christmas Carol comes with a disclaimer that a number of Christmas Carols, from Channing to Vorderman, will not be appearing at the performance: Yes, Mischief Theatre are back revisiting their Cornley Amateur Dramatic Society alter egos for Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. A version of the story was also their first TV special, but this departs not only from that, but also from the format's usual conceit of only showing us the catastrophic production itself, but with the amateur actors' personalities coming across from the varied brand of chaos each of them brings. Here we get the characters - a couple recast, but an impressive amount of the original actors returning well into the company's second decade in the West End - appearing as themselves in a framing device.

So self-important director Chris (Daniel Fraser) holds auditions for Scrooge, despite everyone knowing full well he'll end up giving the role to himself. The bombastic Robert (Henry Lewis) knows he'll only get the lead if Chris is incapacitated, so he sets out on a number of schemes to incapacitate him.

The company's rehearsals provide a lot of good gags, including a production meeting that consists almost entirely of Annie (Nancy Zamit) reading out her overly detailed minutes of the previous meeting, but also sets up a lot of the gags that will pay off once the play itself begins: Most notably a number of foreign objects accidentally finding their way into the model box, so that when Libby Todd's full-size set appears the actors have to navigate their way around a giant box of Maltesers, while the puppet playing Tim is far from tiny, and more of an eldritch abomination.

There's a nice element of nodding to the company's history and the audience's knowledge of it - Jonathan's (Greg Tannahill) running gag is a fear of heights caused by playing Peter Pan, while Dennis' (Jonathan Sayer) need to have all his lines written around the set ends up affecting the plot. Max (understudy Alex Bird) and Sandra (Sasha Frost) turn out to have been taking acting lessons from Robert all along and are trying to impress him so he'll give them a diploma: Max by playing as many roles as possible, Sandra by demonstrating she can do all three of the known emotions (happy, sad and hungry.)

Once again my review at this point is that if you like what Mischief do you'll like this, if you don't you probably won't be converted, but Matt DiCarlo's production shows no sign of them losing the spark of inspiration yet. The three spirits provide reliable setpieces, Annie's inappropriately sexy Christmas Past, Robert's very literal Christmas Present, and Trevor's (Chris Leask) Christmas Yet To cum Come being defined by its Scottish accent (the role being famously silent.) This hits all the Christmas family fun of a panto, but as Chris angrily reminds the audience, this isn't a pantomime. You can probably guess what the audience replies.

Christmas Carol Goes Wrong by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, is booking until the 26th of January at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue; then continuing on tour to Nottingham, Aylesbury, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Canterbury.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.