A Christmas Carol

Sorry I've not been around lately on this blog so much as normal. Truth is that I have been busy creating and sewing my costume for my German production of my one man show of A Christmas Carol in early December this year. I have also been writing and editing my script for the dramatic reading and adding in subtle pieces of the German language and additional descriptive passages from my original adaptation  I've worked from in the past. I've enjoyed it all and my days off work have been filled with buttons galore, sewing, tatting and dying objectives and creative imaginings to bring my costume to fruition to illustrate a storyteller cum Victorian character (certainly not trying to be Charles Dickens) telling the story in a new way but keeping faithful to the original.

the jacket for my show (so far)

The jacket of my costume has been dyed and embellished and distressed with the base being an old chef's coat that I wore when I worked at Cafe Coco Tang eighteen months ago and also wore in the Lace Market Theatre production of Festen as the drunken chef, Kim.

The top hat is authentic and embellished with brown lace and silk. The top hat came from Wild in Nottingham and the lace from Baklash - a vintage store also in Nottingham. The silk was something I had around the house and was formerly a cushion and now an embellishment meant to enhance a funereal scene early on in the show.

scenes from A Christmas Carol at the Lace Market Theatre

Scrooge in the LMT production - played by Roger Newman

As I'm working with all this material (text and fabric) I think back fondly on the times when my full stage production of the same story at the Lace Market Theatre, directed by Martin Berry, was also being echoed at the Jakobus Theatre (where I am about to perform my one man show this year) at the same time in their own theatrical version of the Dickens' novel.

Funny how these things come around and I'm really looking forward to telling all you readers of the great time I had socially and the theatrical success that I had in Karlsruhe with the show that I am currently putting together.

The German language aspects of the piece have been taken from a copy of another 'very true to the original' adaptation of the story published by CBJ Klassiker as I wanted what German I introduced into the script to be correct language-wise. I decided to keep things as simple as possible and added in the titles of the chapters, some small piece of dialogue with the merchants and the final line of Hope by Klein Tim, otherwise known as Tiny Tim. I am hoping that my audiences in Karlsruhe will appreciate all this effort and enjoy re-telling of Dickens' classic tale.