December 16th, 2022Wenham taps his inner scrooge

It’s a great last minute Christmas gift idea for the person who has everything – and packs some timeless food for thought to boot.

Renown Aussie actor David Wenham has been lured back to the stage by the role of cantankerous Scrooge in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella, written by Jack Thorne and directed by Matthew Warchus.

A Christmas Carol, which is playing at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre through to December 29, is taking Wenham back to his first love: theatre and the timeless classic holds messages which seem just as relevant today as when Dickens penned his Yuletide classic.

In this production, Wenham says, he is revelling in the language of both Dickens and Thorne, who adapted the novella for London’s Old Vic Theatre, where it premiered in 2017 starring Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill).

Wenham aims to be faithful to Dickens’s description of Scrooge: “He’s ‘scraping’, he’s ‘wretched’, he’s ‘solitary as an oyster’. They’re delicious words to work with as an actor.”

“[He’s] a wonderful character to sink my teeth into,” Wenham says.

“Characters that were at the extreme ends of society or the personality spectrum have always appealed to me.”

Over the course of the play, set on Christmas Eve, the wealthy miser Scrooge is visited first by the ghost of his late business partner, Marley, and then by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future, who confront him with his behaviour and encourage him to make amends. By the end of the show, he’s a changed man.

Wenham says: “We see him at the beginning with seemingly no redeemable qualities whatsoever. He is selfish, he’s insular, he is secretive, he is unremorseful … By the end of the play, he is exactly the opposite: he’s benevolent, he is open, you couldn’t find somebody who is more joyful than Scrooge.