A One-Man Show

Photos and Story By Anastasia Stanmeyer

THE GREAT-GREAT-GRANDSON OF CHARLES DICKENS PRESENTS A CHRISTMAS CAROL

For half his life, Gerald Dickens has been performing A Christmas Carol. And for all his life, he has been the great-great-grandson of literary legend Charles Dickens. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Gerald Dickens’ remarkable one-man show, which will return to Ventfort Hall on November 30 and December 1. Last winter, I talked with Gerald about his process, watched him transform into Scrooge during the interview, and later attended his captivating performance in Ventfort Hall’s packed library. This year is extra special—A Christmas Carol is 180 years old.

Gerald plays 26 characters, using his vocal and physical talents to bring each scene vividly to life in this play of all Christmas plays. Its unabridged form takes four hours to read. Charles Dickens edited it to 90 minutes for his live readings, which is the version Gerald uses, with some additions through the years.

This is high season for Gerald Dickens, who began his tour de Christmas Carol at the end of October and continues right up to Christmas Day. Residing in Oxford, England, Gerald has traveled throughout the U.K. and the U.S. with his show. He didn’t bring it to the Berkshires, though, until 2018, after a Ventfort Hall board member learned about his performance.

Ventfort Hall is a fitting location to present A Christmas Carol, with the home decked out in Victorian holiday regalia. I am sitting in the library where Gerald will perform that evening. The rows of chairs are empty, and before us is a makeshift stage consisting of red velvet curtains for a backdrop, a coat stand, a chair with fabric draped casually across it, and a rug where Gerald will act out the words to A Christmas Carol. He recalls his first trip to the Berkshires: “It was just glorious. It was blue sky, it was fresh snow, and I compared it to being like a watercolor picture.” Overlaying that first impression was the hospitality that greeted him. Every time he returns, Gerald feels more at home and more a part of the community.

“I just so look forward to coming up here for so many reasons,” he says. “It’s performing in a home like this. It’s working with the Ventfort Hall team. It’s the drive up, coming through the mountains. The great thing about my tour is there is no usual setting. That’s what keeps it fresh, and that’s what keeps me energized. Every single day, it’s a different set of challenges. The theater I was playing in Virginia the day before I was here was a huge auditorium, it exceeded 400 seats with a massive stage, loads of lighting—the whole thing. Then I go into somewhere like Ventfort Hall, and it’s much more intimate. It’s almost as if Dickens had gathered his family and friends in his home’s parlor, and he’s telling them the story. Which is what he did.”

Indeed. Dickens created an amateur theater in his London home to perform whatever play he was acting, directing, stage managing, and publicizing. That would have been a room like the one we are sitting in. When Dickens started reading professionally, he was performing in much larger venues, such at the Steinway Hall in New York City, to an audience of 3,000. So the contrast of venues for Dickens and for his great-great-grandson are quite similar.

Gerald feels a strong bond theatrically to his great-great-grandfather, but it wasn’t always like that.

“As a kid growing up, I studied the works of Charles Dickens at school and hated anything to do with it,” Gerald says. “Then, in the 1980s, the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain did an adaptation of one of his novels, Nicholas Nickleby, which we as a family were taken to see. As a 17-year-old, I didn’t want to be in a theater watching Dickens on New Year’s Eve. And the performance was eight hours long. They did it in two halves—you could see the first half and then you could come back a week later for the second half. But, of course, the Dickens family did the whole thing in one day. We did the matinee and then the evening.”

It began with patrons entering the auditorium, mingling and chatting with members of the cast in costume. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, the characters made their way to the stage, and the first scene just happened. There was no lights out, no BANG!, no overture. It began with a political rally. The show just blew away young Gerald.

“It was amazing,” he recalls. “Eight hours went just like that. Suddenly, that was the connection. The work of Dickens was so theatrical, and the characters were so amazing, and the way he manipulated atmosphere and emotion. An action moved from one location to another so quickly, I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through. Since then, that’s my bond with him. When I’m performing, that theatricality is channeled to me through his works.”

During our talk, Gerald shares some of his great-great-grandfather’s history with me. Charles Dickens was itinerant and didn’t own a home until the very end of his life, a place called Gads Hill Place just outside London in Kent. Charles had seen this house when he was a little boy on a walk with his father. At the time, the Dickens family didn’t have a lot of money. Charles was six when he said to his father, “Gosh, what a beautiful house! If only we could have a house like that.” His father replied, probably just to quiet Charles down, “Look, if you work very hard, if you’re very persevering, then one day, you may have a house like that.” That ruled Charles’ life forevermore, according to Gerald.

The family moved to London when Charles was still young, and things went terribly wrong. His father became heavily in debt and was imprisoned. Charles, by then age 12, was sent to work in a factory to try and raise enough money to release his father from prison. “It was humiliating torture for him. He was in this rat-infested, effluent-smelling little workshop right over the River Thames, which in those days was pretty much an open sewer,” Gerald says. Charles asked himself how that could happen to him, when he once had such a lovely childhood in the countryside? In the back of his mind was what his father had told him about the countryside cottage.

“Everything he did, it kind of came back to the same thing—owning that house in the country,” says Gerald. “It’s an incredible story.”

What drew Gerald to A Christmas Carol? Gerald begins to unravel another story. It was 1993, and celebrations were being held throughout Britain for the novella’s 150th anniversary. That included commemorative postage stamps, TV documentaries, live performances, and more. A woman associated with a local charity asked Gerald early in the year if he could do a reading as a fundraiser. Although he was an actor, a one-man performance or monologue wasn’t in his repertoire. Still, Gerald agreed to do it because it was for a good cause—and then he pretty much forgot about it.

“Then she phoned me in October and said, ‘Are you ready to do the show?’” Gerald panicked and called his father, who was a huge Dickens fan and scholar. “I said, ‘Look, Dad, I’ve agreed to do this. I know nothing about Charles Dickens’ readings. I’ve got to stand there for 90 minutes just reading from a Victorian book. Everyone’s going to be bored. I’ve got to make it exciting. How do I do it?’” His father replied, “I’ll give you some advice: Don’t try, because Charles Dickens has done all the work for you.”

That didn’t seem very helpful. But what did help was his father giving him a copy of the shorter version of A Christmas Carol that the author used for his readings. “That’s your script,” Gerald’s father told him. “If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for you.”

Dad had a point. The next challenge was to make it appealing to a 20th-century audience. Gerald opened the book to the first description of Scrooge.

Gerald paused as he told me the story, rose from his chair, and walked in front of the red curtain. He began to recite the lines: “Oh, but he was a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. He was hard and sharp as flint. He was secret, self-contained, solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, shriveled his cheek, stiffened it ….”

And there you have it. Gerald had become Scrooge, through the words of Charles Dickens. The actor is hunched. His voice is scratchy. His hands are rigid.

“Dad was absolutely right,” says Gerald, walking back to his chair. “Dickens had done all the work for me. You just read the book, and it comes alive.”

When he first started reading Dickens to an audience, Gerald held the book in his left hand and developed a whole series of gestures with his right. Every spirit—Jacob Marley’s ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—had their own way of pointing or moving. One year while on tour in the U.S., Gerald had two shows in a day—one for the Chamber of Commerce in a Holiday Inn conference room in Fayetteville, Tennessee; another in a library in northern Alabama. He remained in costume while traveling between destinations, got lost along the way, and realized way too late that he left his book back in Tennessee.

“The thought came to my mind: I wonder if I can remember it? I’ll give it a go,” he recalls, as if he had a choice. “It was all up here. Every line fit into the next line. They were just coming out on automatic pilot. The whole performance was just looking after itself. I created a bit of theater, purely improvisational.” At the end, everyone was clapping. It was the best thing that could have happened to him.

“I’ve always been slightly in awe of Charles Dickens’ performances, because although he always stood at the lectern with a book, he never looked at it. He memorized the whole script. As an actor in a cast, the longest speech I ever had to learn was maybe a page. To think of having to memorize 30 pages or 40 pages, or whatever it was, was unbelievable. To discover I had memorized it without even making much of an effort was extraordinary.”

Gerald also has adapted Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and a lighthearted show called “Mr. Dickens is Coming!” which is a biographical study of Dickens. He also has adapted short stories such as The Signal-Man and Doctor Marigold. In all, Gerald has a Dickens repertoire of 13 shows. By far, A Christmas Carol is nearest and dearest to him.

“The thing about A Christmas Carol is that audiences all have their own perception and memory and view of it,” says Gerald. “All of that knowledge of the story feeds into the performance as well.” With an edited version of the full-length book, Gerald knows the audience can fill in the gaps if they want. There’s nothing vital to the plot that’s missing from his show, but there may be familiar lines and familiar scenes that they would have seen in certain adaptations. They can slide them in, in their minds.

His favorite part of A Christmas Carol is where he doesn’t say a word. It’s a moment of silence, when Scrooge is with the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, back at the Cratchit house. The same location was shown early on in the story as a house of joy, love, and fellowship. They have this tiny Christmas meal, and they love it. We know that Tim also is very ill. In a much later scene, we are back in the house—and it’s a house in mourning, with no light, no joy, no energy. Nothing. “Playing the scene, I walk along the same route that I walked earlier in the show. I just stand there as the ghost points to the area of the audience where the Cratchits have been established to be. And the line is, ‘It was quiet. It was very quiet.’ There’s an energy of anticipation in the room. Of fear. Of what we know is coming. Everybody knows. Death has visited this house. If the show has gone well, if everything is led up to that point correctly, that moment is just magical.”

The amazing thing is that no show is ever routine or mundane for Gerald, yet the performance is very honest to the text. It’s the environment, the audience, the time of day—everything feeds into making each show unique. What remains constant is the story and one and only storyteller.

“All of these ideas come to me during performances. I never sit down and plan them—such as how the characters move around each other. If you’ve got two characters having a conversation on the stage, I need to know where both of them are so each has to make eye contact with the other. I will be talking and maybe I’ll walk across. And then this character picks up the conversation and his face will follow as the character who started walking. And then the next character will turn and talk to him again, and the eye contact is maintained. The height of each character is important for eye contact. If he’s taller than me, he’s shorter than me, I'm looking down at him a bit.”

Another special thing that Gerald does, whether the audience catches on or not, is to recreate the five main illustrations by John Leech that were in the original book.

As we get up to walk through Ventfort Hall, it seems fitting that Gerald is in full costume. Our interview is complete, and he makes his way down a long hallway. He turns to look back—at me, or past me?—and for a moment, an image of Charles Dickens flashes before me. It was but a moment, yet lingering long in my imagination. Then the great-great-grandson of Dickens turns to continue walking down the long hallway. His top hat, his long jacket, his cane, his deliberate steps, all bring a faint smile to my face. The moment has passed; he is now out of sight, yet his presence lingers. Echoing down the hallway were the words that weren’t said, but in my mind, “God bless us, Every one!”

British actor Gerald Dickens returns to Ventfort Hall to present a one-man theatrical performance of his ancestor’s classic work A Christmas Carol on Thursday, November 30, and Friday, December 1. An elegant tea will be served at 5:30 p.m., followed by his performance at 6:30 p.m. gildedage.org; geralddickens.com