a man of different stories
by Douglas Messerli
David Mynne (performer) A Christmas Carol
(based on the fiction by Charles Dickens) / directed by Simon Harvey / the
performance I attended with Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin and her granddaughter
Elcie on December 7, 2019 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing
Arts, Lovelace Studio Theater in Beverly Hills, California.
Cornwell, England performer David Mynne,
directed by another Cornwellian, Simon Harvey, performs the Charles Dickens’
Christmas classic A Christmas Carol as a kind of gang of voices, from
the sounds of the wind to the chains of his former partner Jacob Marley. In a
sense Ebenezer Scrooge, in this performance, becomes, if nothing else, a
one-man dynamo, who seems to be everywhere at every moment. This is certainly
not the isolated and trying-to-sleep businessman of Edwin L. Marin’s 1938 movie
where Reginald Owens plays a miser desperately seeking to escape all human
contact. No languid escapism in this version of the work!
Just for the fact that Mynne himself performs the specters who threaten
him throughout the night, we see a far greater vision of the psychologically-driven
spirts who haunt him. It reminded me that Marley and he had been students
together at the awful Dickensian boarding-school they both attended, and that
the older “partner” had taken the younger under his wing, so to speak. I’ve
always been interested in that strange male bonding, which, by accident, I
discovered another fictional telling about two days later in The New York
Times Book Review, a review of Jon Clinch’s new novel Marley which
more carefully explores their relationship.
This fictional version of events, obviously, is not completely there in
Mynne’s wonderful performance; yet there is something even stranger about his
sudden attraction to Crotchit’s dying son, Tiny Tim, who he sits upon his
shoulder as a hand glove, in such an intimate action that it almost suggests an
act of pedophilia.
I
looked to my friend Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin’s grandchild Elcie to see how
she was reacting to all of this, but realized her crawling into and up above
her seat that she was probably simply enjoying the crazy puppet-like actions,
as if Mynne’s shoulder sock might be just another version of Sesame Street.
Yet Mynne’s lively production was not so tame as that children’s series.
Even as he buys a giant turkey to feed Cratchit’s brood, there is something
transactional about his actions. The family is well-fed, but we cannot quite
comprehend how they will survive in the future, even as Scrooge now delightedly
attends the Christmas dance party of his nephew.
If
he has found a new life in his very sudden conversion, we recognize him still
as the same man of whoosing winds and horrors he has collected through his
life. The leaves seem to pile up, created through his own voice, even as he
attests a new joy in the Christmas season.
Given he is a single tornado of voices, we can never be sure in this
version who Scrooge really is. He has, in a sense, become his own past, Marley,
the Spirit of Christmas’ past, and the horror of possible Christmas’ future all
in the single spirit of one failed human being. And we never know when one of
those myriad voices will again turn on the human race to express “Bah Humbug.”
If Marley is locked-up in chains of his own terrible actions of the
past, this Scrooge’s life is equally compelled by the man different stories he
tells of his own existence.
A
“slave trade” is truly what Dickens’ work is all about, the trading of human
flesh (or at least a giant turkey) for one’s own pleasure and servitude. Bob
Cratchit must eventually return to work and Tiny Tim will ultimately be removed
from the arm which has brought him back to life.
Having lost his youthful sister, his dearly beloved partner, and his
lover Belle, Scrooge will never truly be one of the ordinary people who
surround him. Bitterness will surely sadly creep into his life once again. In
this production, moreover, Mynne plays all the fragile figures and even the
landscape of a world of capitalist greed, where all the tiny figures of money
made and lost gets toted up. After all, money buys a large turkey for Christmas
dinner; poverty buys an occasional small goose.
Los Angeles, December 9, 2019
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and
Performance (December 2019).
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