@sohoplace

This review is from 2022. ‘A Christmas Carol-ish’ transfers to the West End in 2024, with Martha Howe-Douglas replacing Sarah Hadland. Among a welter of sometimes hamfisted, sometimes magical, adaptations of Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ in London this year (currently 11 and counting), the one at Soho Theatre is a real breath of fresh wintry air. Cos it’s not really an adaptation of ‘A Christmas Carol’. On the pretext of the Dickens Estate not granting him the rights to the story, self-styled ‘Yorkshire Pudding’ Mr Swallow (comedian Nick Mohammed as seen in ‘Ted Lasso’) is forced to replace Scrooge with Santa, Jacob Marley with an elf and everyone else, including Rudolph Hess the reindeer, with paid-by-the line sidekick Jonathan. There are constant interruptions from P&O Ferries singer Rochelle (Sarah Hadland), who’s waiting for a call from Lloyd Webber, some mountaineering, and the birth of Jesus interrupted by a song about a woman in a relationship with a 25-stone turkey. If this all sounds a bit ‘adult panto’, fret ye not. There are no references to chemsex or Matt Hancock. You can take the bigger kids along, no problem. It’s more a deconstruction of the seasonal ritual of the stage version of ‘A Christmas Carol’. Mohammed goes full Count Arthur Strong with his Scrooge – ‘But fateful schpiiiiirrrrriiiitttt’. When the ghost of Elf Marley warns him ‘You will be haunted by three spirits’, Scrooge/Santa asks, ‘Can I just check: does that include you?’ Tiny Tim is dispensed...

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson made their names with The Jungle, a sprawling dramatisation of their own experience running a theatre in the titular Calais refugee camp. In the years since, their company Good Chance has embarked upon numerous other projects, none of them straight up plays. Given both their busyness and how unusual an actual plawrighting duo then it certainly didn’t feel like a given that we’d get another play from them. And yet here we are: produced by Good Chance and the RSC, Kyoto is a drama about the summit that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change. That is, of course, a potentially very dry subject, but reviews from its initial run in a Stratford-upon-Avon were glowing, with particular praise for the decision to make the protagonist not some heroic activist but slimy oil company guy Don Pearlman (Stephen Kunken). As with The Jungle, big name director Stephen Daldry and his deputy Justin Martin direct.