@sohoplace

If you want to grab one of the few remaining tickets left for this show you should ignore my rating and go along with an open mind. Maybe don’t read this review either. Of course I will avoid spoilers but it is probably better to know as little as possible. Still here? OK, I’ll explain. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a play in an envelope. Each night a new actor arrives onstage. The actor has never seen the script before. On my night it was Ghosts star, Mathew Baynton (pictured in theatre). But maybe you’ll catch Minnie Driver or Michael Sheen. Whoever they are, they must open the envelope and read.  Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour wrote the script 14 years ago and it was first performed around the time of the Arab Spring. There are some references to Iran which feel a bit different now - although similar themes are in play in our current moment of history. The play is really a moral fable which raises interesting questions like: how much of life is scripted for us by others or by our context? How much choice do we really have about how to live and therefore how to die? When asked to do things we may not want to do, how far will our obedience go? And yes - that last question does imply that there will be audience participation and plenty of it. Claps to the long list of great actors who take on this challenge. And to the willing victims from the audience too. On the night I went, it felt like everyone was eager to see an intimate acting masterclass. Baynton is a fantastic

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 wit