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 physcologically-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.
Obviously in Dickens’ work there is no
homosexual or even homoerotic connection between the two, but, as Clinch
writes, “The adolescent Marley immediately establishes a viselike hold over the
newly arrived Scrooge,” and you do have to wonder how Scrooge in his early days
so interned himself as an accountant—a role Bob Cratchit later plays to the
miserly Scrooge—to a secretive man who may have been working in his business
dealings in the slave trade—so Clinch suggests—who, when Scrooge discovers the
fact, attempts to redeem the company to which he is attached. But ultimately,
it is the “frightening and dangerously attractive” (as critic Simon Callow
describes him) who, through his love of Scrooge’s sister Fan, is redeemed while
Scrooge becomes the greater monster.
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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