A Christmas Carol - Ikrismas Kherol

Published Monday 3 December 2007 at 17:05 by Jason Best

Charles Dickens’s ghostly fable has been endlessly re-imagined in new settings. But while most reinterpretations have played up the story’s sentiment, the Isango/Portobello company’s South African version strips away the cosy and familiar trimmings to remind us that indignation at poverty and injustice lies at the heart of the tale.

Not that there’s anything earnest about Mark Dornford-May’s show, which is filled with vibrant songs and dance, and stars the incomparable Pauline Malefane, an unforgettable township Carmen in the film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha.

Malefane’s Scrooge is a thrusting example of post-apartheid South Africa’s new black entrepreneurial class, a woman who has turned her back on her township roots to become the hard-hearted owner of a gold mine.

Once a passionate singer, she now declares that ‘singing is for fools’, but she learns the error of her ways thanks to the intervention of three ancestral spirits.

It’s Zanele Gracious Mbatha’s elegant, white-trouser-suited ghost of Christmas past who reminds Scrooge of her origins, projecting filmed episodes from her life on to a huge white sheet hung at the back of the stage. With the exception of a larky sepia sequence that shows Scrooge’s former partner, Zebulon K Mmusi’s Jacob Marley, as a cape-wearing silent movie villain, these township scenes have a quiet pathos that brings home the reality of life in a contemporary South Africa blighted by Aids and inequality.

The show’s most striking moments, however, are created much more simply. The opening has unseen singing miners slowly descending from a gantry high above the stage, shafts of light from their helmet lamps piercing the darkness. Later on, familiar carols such as In the Bleak Midwinter and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen acquire a strange magic when sung beautifully in Xhosa. And when the 30-strong company is in full cry, the life-affirming power of music proves the perfect antidote to bad old Scrooge’s soulless materialism.