6/17/2023 0 Comments Simon callow christmas carol 2022![]() ![]() Callow acts out the characters (his prancing Fezziwig is wonderfully silly) and brings the story to life in a way that few feature film adaptations have managed before. Just Dickens’ glorious prose, beautifully delivered by Callow in a series of mesmerising long takes.īut it’s not just a dry recitation of the text. A handful of effects (an indoor snowstorm is particularly striking), no fancy embellishments, few bells and whistles. It’s essentially an illustrated audiobook, with Callow addressing the audience directly, wandering around a dilapidated, spookily lit and sparsely dressed warehouse as sound designer James Anderson Creed’s atmosphere-enhancing sound effects and Ben and Max Ringham’s low-key ambient electronic score drift in and out. It’s not a standard adaptation but simply a filmed adaptation of the play, with added special effects (mainly of the physical kind) but in truth, the effect is compelling. On paper this might not seem all that appealing. As well as performing in several stage adaptations of Dickens’ work, he’d appeared in a one-man version of A Christmas Carol for some years (based on Dickens’ own famous theatrical readings of the novella) before the BBC decided to make their own version of the stage production in 2018, released to cinemas for one night only on 11 December 2018 before making its TV debut on BBC Four. Callow has written about Dickens and played him on more than occasion, including in performances of Peter Ackroyd’s one-man play The Mystery of Charles Dickens,in the television film Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale (2003), and the theatrically released feature film Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001) (in which he also voiced an animated Scrooge),and on the small screen in An Audience with Charles Dickens (1996) and perhaps most notably Doctor Who: The Unquiet Dead (2005). ![]() If you’re going to make the umpteenth adaptation of Charles Dicken’s immortal classic A Christmas Carol, you could do a lot worse than to have Simon Callow on hand. ![]()
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