As soon as Nick Mohammed explodes onto stage adorned in Scrooge’s nightshirt belting out a schmaltzy power ballad, you know that A Christmas Carol-ish… is going to be a pitch perfect rollercoaster of festive fun.
Mohammed is back as the absent-minded Mr Swallow, a well-intentioned man-child who gets on the nerves of just about everyone around him. This time he is Santa Claus-cum-Scrooge in a festive mishmash of Dickins’ A Christmas Carol. Except that, as Mr Swallow’s stony-faced long-suffering manager Mr Goldsworth explains, they couldn’t get the rights. So it’s Santa mistreating elves at the North Pole instead of Scrooge underpaying Bob Cratchit in Victorian London.
The setup is a classic one. Stage adaptations of A Christmas Carol seems to have engrained themselves within theatre schedules at this time of year for a while now. Three ghosts of Christmas – past, present, and future – appear and do their thing as per. But Mohammed gleefully pokes about the traditional schematics with bounds of playful wit to make it feel fresh. Irreverent jokes and silly gags come thick and fast; the comedy is varied too: there are puns about Rudolph the red nose reindeer and a certain Nazi namesake of his, alongside gags about how Santa copes with a cost-of-living crisis, Covid variants, and the Northern Island backstop.
Mohammed is the beating heart of it all, a dynamo of energy who makes juggling magic, music, and stealing scenes in Ted Lasso look like a walk in the park. He really is the kind of performer you could watch reading the Yellow Pages, if those even exist anymore.
He is joined by a motley crew of performers; David Elms’ Mr Goldsworth, the hilariously drole straight man and Kieran Hodgson as Jonathan, an insecure actor eager to steal the limelight. Miranda’s Sarah Hadland appears as the glamorous cabaret singer Rochelle, who may or may not be called in to cover Grizabella in a gala performance of Cats at the Royal Albert Hall. She is also promoting her typo plagued Christmas album featuring such hits as “Satan is coming to town.”
There’s even a mysterious recorded cameo from someone who sounds suspiciously like David Schwimmer who lends their dulcet tones to the voice of God. It is not beyond the realm of impossibility: Mohammed and Schwimmer are co-stars on BBC sitcom Intelligence after all.
The unsung hero underpinning the performance is keyboardist Honor Halford-MacLeod. She juggles masterfully the range of songs from cheesy festive classics to boisterous ensemble numbers and performs with an infectious electricity that rubs off on the rest of the ensemble.
There is a slapdash charm woven into A Christmas Carol-ish. From the anarchic meta-theatricality of a panto within a panto, to the set and props, it is sure to win any Scrooge over, especially with Mohammed’s endless onstage magnetism.
A Christmas Carol-ish is at Soho Theatre from the 8th to 23rd December
