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.

Theatre review: The Changeling

Ricky Dukes is a fun director, but he does seem incredibly keen on filling small stages with huge furniture, then letting his casts loose to try and manoeuvre their way around it: In last year's Doctor Faustus it was a maze of big wooden desks that everyone was banging their shins against; for this year's return to The Little with The Changeling they're trying to squeeze around a boardroom table, with Colette O'Rourke's Beatrice-Joanna at one point getting stuck when her hooped wedding dress swallowed an office chair. I haven’t seen Succession (it’s not on any of my streaming services, I’m not being a hipster about it,) but I assume that like a lot of recent shows that’s the visual reference that Sorcha Corcoran’s design is making.