Dark design for morality tale

There's not a jolly red Santa in sight in the Royal New Zealand Ballet's Christmas treat. BERNADETTE RAE explains.

It's a Christmas Carol but don't expect red and green, jolly holly berries, winking lights on a Christmas tree and a fine, fat friend from the South Pole.

The designer of the Royal New Zealand Ballet's end-of-year treat, Kristian Fredrikson, was determined to get away from "the Hollywood movie stereotype of Christmas" in reworking the sets and costumes for choreographer Russell Kerr's big, new ballet.

"Our popular version of Christmas comes out of America," says Fredrikson. "The jolly, red Santa person was first fabricated for a Coca-Cola advertisement. The whole modern Christmas thing is based on a jumble of various mythologies."

The jumble was not around in Dickens' day and Fredrikson has turned to the darker, more desperate ambience of Dickens' London, circa 1840, for his inspiration.

"It is a dark design for a dark piece," he says. "A Christmas Carol is about a man who has chopped himself off from humanity in his pursuit of gain.

"So the set is basically Scrooge's bedroom, a great mausoleum of a place where he has chosen to lock himself away and where he will die if he doesn't learn to change.

"The set has a Gothic feeling - it is physically dark, I must say. But the story is dark and has reverberations for all of us and we can't fail to respond to that."

On opening night in Wellington, one small child reacted in highly audible terror to some of the grimmest scenes when the 3m tall Ghost of Christmas to Come got moving around the stage in an epiphany of frightening foreboding.

Fredrikson's set also reflects the living environment of Dickens' first readers of A Christmas Carol - "dark, dank old London" - and the costumes, are equally faithful to Victorian dress.

Fredrikson loves Victoriana. "Can you think of anything more memorable than Holly Hunter in that bonnet in The Piano?"

Kim Broad, long-time dancer with the RNZB who has come out of retirement to play Scrooge, has his own reflections on the authenticity of the costumes.

"They are extremely hot," he says. "I start off wearing a woollen vest, a woollen suit jacket, then a heavy woollen frock-coat complete with a half cape arrangement around the shoulders, and trousers, of course. Woollen trousers. I get to take the coat off, but then there is a big, heavy dressing gown. Oh yes, there is the wig. And a nightcap."

Seventy-one-year old Russell Kerr first created A Christmas Carol in 1990 for the Southern Ballet, thinking then it would be his last ballet before he retired. A decade on, retirement is still a future prospect.

And A Christmas Carol has metamorphosed through a season as an opera, for Canterbury Opera - produced by Kerr - to a grandly expanded work he describes as basically ballet, but with dramatic and pantomime overtones and even a touch of musical comedy when that is justified.

The setting is very different from the "minimal" Christchurch original. The RNZB has commissioned the same trio - Fredrikson, Kerr and lighting designer Mark Simpson - who proved to have the winning formula with previous works Peter Pan and Swan Lake.

The score by Philip Norman has also grown and changed.

For Kerr, some of the greatest changes were fuelled by his explorations on the internet. He discovered all sorts of Victorian London websites, and the detailed information led to several new characters being introduced.

Kerr discovered the Victorian penchant for prostitutes and added two to his new production. He also found a prominent pantomime clown of the era.

One Grimaldi was a favourite of Dickens so a Grimaldi appears in the opening scenes, a humorous comic character who offsets Scrooge nicely and provides Fredrikson with a good excuse for breaking out of all the muted woollen weaves in the wardrobe department, even if Grimaldi did not appear in the book.

"It is not a grim story really," Kerr insists. "But it is a moral story, so it has to go through the dark periods to expose the real character of Scrooge before his transformation to show how, in the final scene, the miser has really changed."

But even then, don't expect tinsel and coloured balloons. Fredrikson allows just a spot of bell-ringing and a few tasteful branches of dark green and white-berried mistletoe.

* A Christmas Carol: Aotea Centre, Dec 5-9; Founders Theatre, Hamilton, Dec 12,13.