What happens after “And They All Lived Happily Ever After” in fairytales? What kind of Sultan would Aladdin, a washerwoman’s son with no political training, really make? Would Cinderella, after a life of domestic drudgery, really be up to owning corgis, opening fetes and making small talk with tedious politicians? Prince Charming would probably find the Seven Anklebiters tiresome after a while and no Beauty wants her transformed Beast taking more time than her in front of the Magic Mirror.
The opening scene of the RSC’s God In Ruins at the Soho Theatre picks up Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol a few years on with an aggrieved Bob Cratchitt keen to spend a family Christmas away from the relentlessly jolly reformed Scrooge whose presence is a constant reminder to him that he could not save his own son’s life. This post Ever After Cratchitt’s frustration and humiliation serve as a reminder that A Christmas Carol is more than just a fairy story: it is a morality tale about human nature. Scrooge finds redemption within himself; the ghosts simply show him where to look.
Anthony Neilson, God In Ruins’s writer and director, swiftly moves the action from a 19th to a 21st century Christmas Eve. Traditional ideas of an English Christmas are increasingly at odds with urban life in the digital revolution: gone are the gas lit cobbled streets. Shiny young faces pressed up at pie shop windows are more likely to be glued to Facebook on shiny laptops in strip lit cafes: tiny.tim@cratchitt.com perhaps. Scrooge’s role is accordingly taken by a very modern man: Brian the divorced, dissolute, drug-addled reality TV producer deep in therapy and desperate to speak to his estranged daughter.
The morning after the mother of all Christmas benders – one of the funniest sequences in the play – Brian is haunted by a series of apparitions including his own dead father and Ebeneezer Scrooge himself. These unwelcome visitors help Brian trawl his past and find a way to reconnect with his daughter before it’s too late. To say any more would be to give away too much.
Anthony Neilson generated the script by working with the Stratford cast of the RSC production of Macbeth earlier this year. The play retains all that is best about such collaborative work: minimal set and furniture allow a strong ensemble to shine on an uncluttered Soho Theatre stage. The sound, lighting and costumes – so often overlooked – are key elements in the production’s success.
God In Ruins is a lot more than A Christmas Carol for our time. It is an acute, unflinching exploration of the changing roles and identity issues facing men in the internet age. It is also one of the funniest, foulest-mouthed politically incorrect masterpieces I have ever seen at the theatre.
If you don’t go and see it then May You Live Haunted Ever After.
God In Ruins runs at the Soho Theatre, London, until 5 January 2008.
