A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Dramaturgical Casebook 

Welcome to the  online dramaturgical casebook for Santa Cruz Shakespeare's 2024 production of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted and directed by Charles Pasternak. This website serves as a resource for the cast and crew as they develop their approaches to the text as well as for audiences who wish to enrich their experience of seeing the performance, compiled by Renée Fox and Michael M. Chemers, dramaturgs. On this website you will find a variety of research materials. At the top of this page is the navigation bar, where you will find: 

• "The Man Who Invented Christmas?" which introduces you to Charles Dickens and his influence on modern celebrations of the holiday

• "Dickens and Performance" which reveals the relationship of Dickens and his writing to the theatre of the past 150 years.

• "Politics, Then and Now"

• Important Terms and Concepts: here we explain the specialized themes and vocabulary of the play, addressed in the order of their appearance in the script.

• Blog: here you will find a variety of materials including some important reviews of previous productions, scholarly articles, critical writings and much more!

Below you will find a short dramaturgical orientation statement entitled "Why This Play Now?" 

Why This Play Now?

by Renée Fox

A Christmas Carol is one of those stories that everybody already knows. Maybe the first image it conjures for you is Kermit the Frog in a Victorian top hat or Scrooge McDuck diving into his Money Bin; maybe you imagine snow gently falling on 19th-century London streets as Tiny Tim whispers “God bless us, everyone,” or tables sagging under family feasts of goose and turkey and Christmas puddings. Or maybe you mostly remember the ghosts: Jacob Marley, dead to begin with, weighed down by the clanking chains he forged in life, or the spirits of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come, whirling Ebenezer Scrooge through all he’s lost and might still lose by refusing to take part in the joyously interconnected webs of humankind.

Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella has been adapted countless times in theatre, film, tv, art, opera, comic books, even video games across the last nearly 200 years. By February of 1844—less than three months after the novella appeared—eight theatrical productions of A Christmas Carol were already onstage in London, and Dickens himself performed more than 120 dramatic public readings of the novel in Britain and the US between the 1850s and his death in 1870. While several of Dickens’s other novels—especially Oliver Twist and Great Expectations—have been regular fodder for stage and screen adaptations, A Christmas Carol has unique cultural longevity and resonance.

In part, Carol’s endurance rests on the novella’s distinct fairy tale quality, its story of moral transformation populated by allegorical characters and set in spaces that could be anywhere, at any moment: offices, family homes, city streets, rural roads. In part it’s because Dickens’s crystallizing vision of the Christmas spirit—a heady mix of generosity, family, interconnectedness, overabundance, and introspection—almost immediately became synonymous with the holiday itself, even if his story emerged from (as much as shaped) new Christmas traditions that were taking root in mid-19th-century Victorian Britain. And in part it’s because the theatrical qualities of A Christmas Carol—its 5-act structure, its dialogue, its special effects, its melodramatic conversion narrative, and its spectatorial imagination—have always made it particularly suited to adaptation, both in theatres and through ever-developing new media technologies that make the most of the tale’s gothic, ghostly, time-bending potential.

And yet, Carol is more than these parts. While the conversion of a cruel, solitary miser into a benevolent, happy soul drives the plot of this story, its true political and emotional heart lies in its fervent refusal to judge any life unworthy, however downtrodden, disregarded, or dismal that life might be. The pinnacle of Scrooge’s heartlessness at the beginning of the story is his casual suggestion that impoverished people might as well just die “and save us the expense” of their care. The lives of these people, he suggests, are worth less than his own, aren’t real human lives to be grieved. The spirits confront him with the horror of such inhumane thinking: “Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?” the Ghost of Christmas Present asks him, before sharply reminding him that “it may be...that you are more worthless and less fit to live than” all of the people Scrooge found so valueless.

Christmas Present suggests that Scrooge’s refusal to see all life as grievable life might, in fact, make Scrooge the ungrievable one, and this is precisely the fate that Scrooge faces when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him his own death and the utter absence of grief it occasions. Only when his community deems him worth little more than the value of his bed curtains and the lunch at his funeral, dehumanizing him in the same economic terms that he so long used to dehumanize others, can Scrooge finally recognize the atrocity of rendering a life ungrievable. Lives matter in A Christmas Carol, and the story makes its most radical political intervention by saving Scrooge from becoming just one more ungrieved life—by insisting that even this life, this harmful, merciless life, has worth and merit in the world, as do all the other lives so easily cast aside by social systems that refuse to see them as human lives.

We are all entangled with one another, “fellow-passengers to the grave,” as Fred tells his Uncle Scrooge. The lush language that this adaptation borrows from Dickens helps us feel the magic of an entangled world, as the abundance of sights and smells and sounds swirling across and through all of the voices on stage thin the boundaries between individuals, between landscapes, between moments in time, even between this world and the next. The joy that we, and Scrooge, embrace at the end of this play is the joy of communal experience: sitting in this theatre together, encountering together a new version of this intimately familiar story, we feel what it is to be an integral part of humanity, to forge connections with all the many lives we share the world with.  

Questions? Renee Fox (rafox@ucsc.edu) and Michael Chemers chemers@ucsc.edu