There are many things to enjoy about immersive theatre company The Lost Estate’s dinner theatre Dickens adaptation The Great Christmas Feast. There’s also quite a bit to fault – to a large extent logistical problems that may or may not be ironed out later in the run.
At its core this is a one man plus musicans take on A Christmas Carol that pays homage to Dickens’s own famed solo performances: stiffed by the feeble Victorian copyright laws, he devoted much of his later years – and health – to spectacularly entertaining one-man readings of his work. The Taylor Swift of his day, maybe.
In The Great Christmas Feast we’re cast as a specially invited audience, who Dickens (Alex Phelps) has brought over to his gaff for dinner and his solo performance of A Christmas Carol. Phelps’s full pelt, unselfconscious performance is good fun, and is occasionally nudged into something really quite sublime by the accompanying violinists and percussionists. Stefan Rees’s music brings an elegant, sonorous majesty to proceedings that easily compensates for the lack of the usual phantasmagorical special effects. Sat at restaurant-style tables that circle the small raised central performance space, everyone had a good view and there’s a genuine sense of intimacy between audience and performer.
The problems come with the food service – the modern British-styled cuisine is pleasant, but it takes a very long time to be served to some parts of the room, and the show really loses momentum between the second and third acts. Hopefully it’s something that will be addressed as the run continues – some real love and care has gone into the performance and the music.