Washington National Cathedral

Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our ongoing conversation at the intersection of faith and public life.

Today we are especially excited to have with us no one other than Ebenezer Scrooge. I have been promising an appearance and here he is. He is dressed up acting like he is an actor named Martin Rayner, but he is actually Ebenezer Scrooge for many of us.

We are here to talk about that favorite of the Christmas season, A Christmas Carol: the story itself, what it means to perform it, how it has been performed. But mostly, why is it so important, what meaning does it have for us, and why is it that we all turn to it so frequently in the Christmas season?

To do that we have Martin Rayner, who is playing Scrooge at Ford’s Theater now in the very popular production of A Christmas Carol. And we have John Glavin from Georgetown University, a Dickens scholar, playwright, and an adapter of Dickens’s novels and of this one.

We are delighted to be here as we talk about this important part of the Christmas season and this marvelous moral, and some would say even spiritual, tale. So welcome to Martin and to John this morning. It is great to have you here.

Well, I never thought I would have Ebenezer Scrooge right here at the Sunday Forum, but we need to seize this moment and learn everything we can about how Ebenezer Scrooge came to be, as well as how his character is performed.

So I would like to start with John, our Dickens scholar for the day. Why do you think A Christmas Carol has been as popular as it has been for well over a hundred years?

John Glavin: I think it is popular for a number of reasons. First of all, it is so accessible. I think that it is a very serious story about suffering and loss and a very dark story in many ways. But in a very typical way, Dickens writes it in a form that is comic and enjoyable, and it immediately grabbed its audience, and it has continued to grab its audiences.

It also is a really economically told tale. A lot happens in A Christmas Carol in a very few pages, and so you—unlike, say, the big novels of Dickens, which take a lot of work to read—you can get through this very easily. I think the third thing, and there are many others, is that even from the beginning, it was adapted. Even as it was—in fact there is a famous plagiarism suit—even as Dickens was publishing it, other people were taking it up and using it. It has been adapted really since the mid 1840s, so that it is retrievable in a lot of forms, you know. Miss Piggy as Christmas Past, I mean we can get at it in a lot of different ways.

Lloyd: Yeah. Charles Dickens was facing financial stresses of his own at the time he was writing this, wasn’t he?

Glavin: He was. Poor Dickens ... Dickens was very bad about money. As everybody knows, his father was put in prison for debt. And Dickens was frightened about money all his life, because he understood the dire consequences of being bankrupt in Victorian England. By the time he got to the mid 1840s—this came out in 1843—Dickens was really in a great deal of trouble. He had a growing family, his own birth family, his father, and his brother, leached on him terribly and were constantly borrowing money in his name. And by the late autumn of 1843, Dickens was convinced he was going to go to prison for debt; that the demands on his income and the income didn’t match. And his novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, hadn’t made the kind of money that he had hoped he would make. Among other things, Christmas Carol is an attempt to make a lot of money at Christmas so that he could pay his debts in the New Year. So the economic necessity that’s driving part of the story is also driving Dickens’s own life.

Lloyd: Now, is Christmas at this time already something that one might want to market something around? Was it beginning to develop that kind of popularity?

Glavin: It was. Sometimes people say Dickens invented Christmas and that is not really true, although Dickens was terrific at spotting a trend and riding it. He clearly saw in the 1840s that this new celebration of Christmas was on its way. The Puritans, as you know, had refused to celebrate Christmas. They had seen it essentially as a papist holiday, and so they had made Christmas illegal in England. And it gradually sort of crept back into English practice in the course of the 18th and into the early nineteenth century.

But the Christmas that we know and the Christmas that Dickens is beginning to celebrate is essentially a north German Christmas. It comes into England through Germany and through Holland. We know that Dickens was deeply influenced by Washington Irving’s Christmas stories. But Washington Irving’s stories are about Christmas in New York.

We also know that the Prince Consort, who had married Queen Victoria in 1839, had brought a whole series of German Christmas customs, including the Christmas tree, which is not English at all, into England. At Windsor, people began to celebrate a kind of very German Christmas, not just a Christmas tree, but each member of the family got a Christmas tree up on a table with footmen with extinguishers waiting to put out the candles in case everything burnt down. One wonderful little detail, the Christmas tree became very popular because there is an engraving of Christmas at Windsor with the Queen and Prince Albert and their children. This was widely circulated in England, and then people began to have Christmas trees.

But it was also widely circulated in this country. But in this country, in the lithography, they erased the Queen’s tiara so that it would look like a kind of bourgeois family at home and not like a royal celebration.

Christmas was coming in in the 1840s. Dickens saw it was coming in and he decided to make some money out of it.

Lloyd: One more bit of context. England itself was going through a difficult economic time as well.

Glavin: Yes. Victorian scholars talk about the 1840s as the hungry 40s. There had been a real collapse of the economy as a result of the readjustment after the Napoleonic Wars and one of the things that had happened in the aftermath of the wars was that bread and grain had become taxed. So, the poor had really lived on virtually starvation diets because it was so hard to get grain for bread and there were a series of riots in the course of the 1840s. There were demonstrations of course in the 1840s as everybody knows this was not just true in England. In 1848, Europe exploded in revolutions and there were real fears that in 1848 England would also break out in a revolution. In fact, the royal family was whisked away from London and hidden at Windsor because there was tremendous fear that the same kind of thing that was raging in Europe would rage in England. It didn’t happen in England, but very, very poor times. So when you have those two children at the end of the second night, the ignorance and want, that’s not exaggeration, that’s actually a memetically accurate depiction of what you would have seen in any dense urban neighborhood in any of the English major cities, the industrial cities as well as London.

Lloyd: Martin Rayner (or Scrooge maybe I should say), you go out night after night and you face off with Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, those poor Christmas Carolers. How does one become Scrooge? How do you get inside such a difficult character as that? Is it hard to do or does it come naturally?

Martin Rayner: There is a certain amount of rage in me, yes. (Audience laughs and Rayner chuckles.)

No, I was just thinking as you were talking, one way of approaching Scrooge is when you think of the commercialization of Christmas and the way we are led away from what Christmas truly is in terms of our spirit. And it becomes, I think, of what Scrooge actually says to his nephew, Fred, in the office after the play is just begun. He says, “What’s Christmas time to you but a time to paying bills with no money, a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer. If I had my will, every idiot who goes around with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart, he should.”

Well, you know, that is Scrooge basically being anti-Christmas. But, sometimes when I am at the mall and I see what’s going on there, I feel somewhat so, so I use that. Also, the redemption of any human being is such a wonderful, wonderful thing that, you know, in order to come out into the light you have to go through the darkness. I think we all are aware of that in these times. You know it is a very difficult time in this country. But for me as an actor, when I am going through that difficult dark period with Scrooge, I am doing it with a will because I know that I will shoot out into the light at the end of it so that is the payoff for me as an actor. I think I will get to really have joy and celebrate with the audience once we have all been through this difficult part. So that is how I approach it.

Lloyd: In the Ford’s Theater production, you start off actually as Dickens before the play even begins. Dickens giving a public reading of A Christmas Carol, which apparently he did quite a bit of, and I understand that this is something he did on a couple of visits to Washington, apparently, through the years too. But could you give us a little piece of that opening monologue?

Rayner: Yes, absolutely, I would be happy to. Interestingly, Dickens, I believe it was the Carol Theater, if I am not mistaken, where he did his reading, which actually is the site of which is not far from Ford’s. But the idea of this whole adaptation of what we are doing was to rekindle that idea of him being in Washington, and so I’ll give you a little excerpt from the very beginning of the show before it explodes into the production itself.

And Dickens comes on with his prompt book and addresses the audience and he says, “Good evening, a very good evening to each and every one of you. It is an honor indeed to be here with you in Washington tonight. In the reading of my little book I pause only to remind you that there will be no intermission and to reassure you that you may laugh or weep without any fear of disturbing me or the reading of my little story.” And then he proceeds to begin.

“Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergymen, the clerk, the undertaker, and by his partner and sole mourner, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge signed it, and his name was good for anything he chose to put his hand to. Ooh! But Scrooge, he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, a clutching, grasping, squeezing, wrenching, covetous old sinner. Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, ‘My dear Scrooge, how are you?’ Even blind men’s dogs, when they saw him coming, would tug their owners into doorways until Scrooge passed. However, let it be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of this story, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.”

And then it proceeds on into the production itself.

(Audience claps)

And one fun thing to add about our production is that it has a certain abstract quality, and so, when we do move on into Scrooge in his counting house we find Scrooge sitting atop an enormous pile of safes with money bags all around, so it is quite abstract.

Lloyd: Well, if Scrooge feels an urge to jump back into our conversation, you can tell him that he continues to be welcome. We talked about Dickens needing to make some money. We talked about the economic conditions. But I guess the question that most interests us is, what was Dickens trying to get at in telling this story? Obviously, it is moving in an array of ways and, even John, I would ask you this, were there some clear religious convictions underlying the vision that come through in the story?

Glavin: Dickens’ religion is a really complex question. We know that he despised organized religion and whatever its form, and he tried for a while to be Unitarian and it didn’t take. He spent a lot of his life trying to in effect rescue Christ from Christianity. For his children in 1846 he wrote A Life of Our Lord, which he never published. It was published only after the death of his youngest child. But it clearly shows him deeply engaged by the New Testament and deeply engaged by what the message and the witness of Christ seem to be; but not in any kind of predictable sorts of ways. I think the Christmas Carol is involved in a kind of dialogue with Christianity in a number of different ways. Three of which I think maybe are really important.

One is the really interesting notion that the worst sins are sins of omission. I think it is really wrong to think that Scrooge is being presented as somebody who has been a bad businessman. Or who is Bernie Madoff, before Bernie Madoff. It is not that he is in any way a dishonest businessman.

It is not what he has done that really condemns him, it is what he didn’t do. It’s what he left out. And Marley keeps bringing that back in the beginning, what he left out in the beginning. Not what I have done, but what I have left undone that is the real burden of guilt and sin. I think that follows from a very rich and complex theological tradition.

The second—and it is one that actually makes Dickens not part of our world but interesting for our world—is that Dickens doesn’t understand individual salvation as merely individual. If one is saved, always saved inside a community, one can’t in a way be better than one’s community.

When we were preparing in the dean’s office, we were talking about how much of this script is dialogue. You begin with a monologue voice, but it turns into dialogue very rapidly. The dialogue is really central to Dickens’ vision of experience. One is always in dialogue with those around one. One becomes real, in a sense, through the interaction of dialogue.

One can’t then be better than one’s community. If one wants to be a good person, one has to live in a good world. He over and over again shows this. The other fiction is a good person is destroyed in a bad world. You can see goodness being taken away from people. He says that in fact, with the two children, that if they are not succored, if they are not nurtured, they are going to become corrupt. There is no way for their innate goodness to be preserved.

I think the third thing that I am actually very interested in at the moment is the apocalyptic side of Christmas Carol. I think apocalypse is really important for Dickens. It is important for a lot of other nineteenth-century writers like Carlyle and Ruskin also.

Lloyd: Can you say what you mean by that?

Glavin: Yes. That the times must be changed; the world must be changed; that we are living at the edge of a corrupt and destructive moral and economic order in A Christmas Carol. And if people don’t understand that, they have to, in a kind of prophetic way, stand up and be witnessed with a different possibility for experience, then that world is going to come to an end.

The nineteenth century is always aware of the French Revolution. It is always aware of the fact that, when you get to a certain kind of point, all the horrors that you have allowed will come back and destroy you. And the apocalyptic language of the New Testament—and behind that obviously the prophetic kind of apocalypse in the Old Testament—is always working in Dickens, it is always powerfully working in Dickens. As I say, Christmas Carol is actually an amusing book, but it is also a very dark book.

Lloyd: One further piece of this question about the religious vision. I was in a conversation yesterday and I said to someone, what a wonderful moral tale A Christmas Carol is. And this is a person who has done a fair amount of teaching of Dickens herself. She said, “Well it is a lot more than that.” She said, “It is in many ways a very deeply Christian story imbued with Christian symbolism and hints of a larger Christian vision”.

She pointed out, for example, that Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge, those are highly Old Testament names. Quite a number of the names in the Cratchit household, Tim and Peter, are New Testament names, so there is a little world that is passing away and a new world filled with Christian love is what needs to come. She also pointed out, what struck me as very interesting, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus: where the rich man simply lives by himself in a mansion and Lazarus is at the gate with sores, and all of a sudden they both die. When they die, the rich man is in Hades and Lazarus is up with Abraham and the rich man begs for help then. Finally, the word comes from, I guess from Father Abraham, no, from someone who says “unless someone comes back from the dead to tell you what to do, you will never be saved”. And of course what we have in A Christmas Carol is three spirits and a partner back from the dead. Do you sense that this thinking is intentional in Dickens?

Glavin: Yes, I think that the parable of the rich man and the poor man, or Dives and Lazarus, is always recurring with Dickens for a lot of different reasons. Largely because of the life that he saw his family living in the debtors’ prison. That debtors’ prison is a kind of a hell, and so he has kind of a lived analog to the story and I think that people often make a mistake. They talk about this as a kind of post-Christian or unchristian story because it is very clear that the nativity story itself has a very, very small role here. People go to church at the end, but this is not a Christian story in the sense that people are being redeemed by Christ.

It is a story which understands that the model of Christ is to be taken by each individual person and to be lived out in the kind of self-sacrificing, altruistic way that you see happening through the gospel story, and that part of the complex theology in which Dickens both wants the values of Christianity but doesn’t want to, say, the strict theology of Christianity to happen. But one of the things I would say is really interesting [is] that Dickens rewrites the New Testament. Right? Dickens rewrote everything. So he takes the New Testament parable, which says that nobody can come back and convert you, and says, no, no, that is not true. Somebody can come back and you can be converted and one of the things he is rewriting in A Christmas Carol very clearly, Macbeth.

Lloyd: Macbeth?

Glavin: Yes, Macbeth. Dickens is obsessed with Shakespeare, and he is obsessed with these ghost scenes in Shakespeare. The ghosts scenes in Richard III, the ghost scenes in Macbeth and this whole world in which the spirits come to you and warn you of your demise, warn you of your fall, and he certainly is playing on a whole series of nineteenth-century theatrical productions.

And I think one of the reasons it is so easy for you guys to do this is that it is actually derived in part from the theater originally and a whole series of ghost scenes on stage are what gets rewritten in Christmas Carol. So what you get here is this really complex conflation of Shakespearean material, and New Testament material, and Old Testament material all being reworked in this highly original way that is Dickens.

Lloyd: Martin, when you play Scrooge, are there certain points in your own performance where you feel you are coming most alive or something is really shifting that speaks to you where you feel your energy surges in the story?

Rayner: Yes, there are, and I just want to add to what you were just saying.

I think it is such a long-standing tradition that artists sort of basically take their imagination, they take whatever is around them and then mix it all up and go their own sweet way from Shakespeare to the Beatles to Dickens and then the scholars are left to try and clean up after them. I mean in the sense of you know—(Glavin intercedes with: “admire the mess”) (back to Rayner)—yes, admire the mess would be a better way to put it. I just think that is the wonderful delinquency of the artist. (Lloyd and Glavin laugh.)

But anyway, then, the thrill of pleasure I get, there are certain moments, yes, and there usually are moments that are very difficult for an actor to do. Some of the largest moments that you have to do on the stage—whether it be bereavement, murder, you know, whatever it is—those large moments in our lives are very, very difficult. They are easy to parody or they are easy to assimilate but they are very, very hard to actually experience, because there are many things we haven’t experienced that we have to do.

So for me, my vigil, as an actor as I go through a role any night, is to try to keep scraping away and getting back to the actual moment of what that actually is, as opposed to a sort of mimicry of it. And that is the grail of the actor. So if I find a moment where I see, say my young significant other, Belle, in A Christmas Carol, who I haven’t seen in many years since we broke up, and I have since become this crusty old isolated man, to actually be there on the stage and to try and really get that to come alive for me, when it does, that is when I get my most energy. Or when I see a young Scrooge being left alone at school and I can actually think of either my own son being alone or me, that’s when the real energy comes to an actor.

I don’t know if you can relate to that but—(Dean Lloyd says “yeah”)—but there is a huge difference between pretending and being.

Lloyd: Do you play a different Scrooge in different productions?

Martin Rayner: In different performances? Yes, yes. Last night for instance, sometimes you really have to take where you are at in your life on that particular evening and go with that. You can try to do exactly what you did the night before, but that is very dangerous, because then you are doing something artificial. So mostly you have to take the state that you are in when you walk into the theater and then try to feed it into the process.

And last night for some reason—normally I play Scrooge younger than he would be played, because I am Dickens playing Scrooge. I am not just an actor playing Scrooge, I am Dickens playing that role. But last night he [seemed much older than me]. You know, “Cratchit, what do you think you are doing when you can’t put coal on the fire” and you know, I thought, Good Lord (laughter) who is here tonight? Who has showed up tonight?

And that actually is really what’s wonderful, because, as I am moved through meeting the different ghosts and so on, he became a harder nut to crack than usual and so you know, when… even during Christmas Present, when all the joy is being scattered around and he is being shown so many joyous scenes, there is still a reluctance that I found in myself: oh yes, that is great, but I am not going along with it, you know. So yes, it varies very much from night to night.

Lloyd: Is there a moment for you that you find always challenging to get through? That you want to make sure you go one way rather than the other? Or does every performance really have its own rhythm, take its own way?

Rayner: Yes, there are several key moments along the road of Christmas Carol. If you take the wrong turn you can get into trouble. Key moments for me are when he is first experiencing ghostly things. The Christmas Past comes along and in our production, Christmas Past comes in, flies in, and she is a lady of, I am guessing 4 foot high, and she has her own crutches which are all dressed up for the show. She has a staff with a big crystal that lights up, and she is really magnificent and wonderful. She flies in on to the stage and gradually comes down and lands. So, that is my first experience of a ghost. It is wonderful for the audience. I really don’t get to see it from where the audience is, but I know that it is so. There are two ways to go at that very moment. One is to play the scene, and the other is to think, what would it really be like if we were sitting here right now and something like that happened? Well, Good Lord, I mean, your hair would stand on end and you would just like … it would be very difficult to grasp what you were experiencing. Wouldn’t it?

And that’s the truth of that moment. So that is a key moment. Those key moments come along all the way when Christmas Future particularly comes in. That is a key moment that has to be that.

And finally the redemption, because redemption can just be a lot of laughter and happiness. But it is just a tremendous relief and tremendous rescue from a terrifying image and world that one has been in and there is a very big difference between those two ideas of being saved from, well you know, we are in that kind of an environment now. People are foreclosing on their homes, the roofs over their heads, and for somebody to come along and say, “No, it is all right, you get to have your house.” Well, there are so many emotions involved with that, you know, so yes, there are many key moments.

Lloyd: It is quite a story of an awakening, isn’t it? Step by step, what we call in a place like this, a conversion. But it is a slow step-by-step discovery of how blind he was and how rich with possibility the world around him. I was watching last night the George C. Scott production to get ready for today and watching the tension begin to fall out of Scrooge’s face, step by step, and seeing him begin to discover an alternative possibility for being in the world. It must be a moving thing to act through, to live through, night after night.

Rayner: Yes, it is, and it never gets old. It never gets old. In a way the greater the resistance to the conversion, the greater the conversion that comes. And in some ways, it is not unlike Hamlet. Perhaps you would know this better than I. But it strikes me that, in many ways, that Scrooge is cracked open when his Christmas Past comes along. I mean he sees his own childhood, and he sees his friends, and he is broken open by that. Then by necessity he kind of closes over it again. As Hamlet cannot take revenge immediately or the play would be over immediately. So there is a certain stagecraft in that.

Glavin: Well, I think A Christmas Carol is also in some ways indebted to Hamlet and I think there is actually a very explicit way in which you can see the connection. There is an old, old, old English tradition in which you tell ghost stories on Christmas Eve. And he calls it a ghost story and I think that sometimes we forget that the genre for him is the ghost story.

If you go back to his first Christmas book, in Pickwick Papers, “Christmas at Dingley Dell,” everybody gets together and tells ghost stories and there is a moment at the beginning of Hamlet where they are talking about the ghost and what the ghost is doing. And someone says, well, on Christmas Eve, the cock crows all night and therefore ghosts can’t come and the ghosts are kept off, and so it is safe to tell a story about ghosts on Christmas Eve because the actual ghosts can’t arrive. So you can talk about them without fear. And I think there is a way in which Dickens is remembering that moment at the beginning of Hamlet and I think that is the kind of little nub that begins to generate the rest of the story.

Lloyd: One more question before we go to questions from our audience. Both of you all must have your views of some of the many film productions. I know, John, a lot of your scholarly work has been the adapting of Dickens stories to film itself. Does each of you have a favorite, one that you think captures it best or to one you like to go back to?

Rayner: Well, I absolutely do. I have seldom seen A Christmas Carol done the way I imagined it, as fully realized. But I think Alastair Sim’s, in that wonderful black-and-white version, is my favorite.

Lloyd: Alastair Sim’s? Is that right?

Rayner: Yes, yes. It is just very, very beautiful to watch and for my money it comes closest to Dickens.

Glavin: I want to underscore the fact that the glory in the Dickensian adaptation is that no adaptation is the same as the Christmas Carol and the glory of Dickens is that it can be done in so many ways, and all of those ways are right. But I have to say my favorite is Albert Finney.

Lloyd: Albert Finney. Yes.

Glavin: Yes, I love Albert Finney. I love Albert Finney. That is the one that was so dark that it failed economically. That one was too gloomy A Christmas Carol.

Lloyd: Does Scrooge get out of the dark place by the end of the story?

Glavin: He does. But it is filmed in a very dark sort of gray-green light, and it really emphasizes how gloomy the world is and how dark early Victorian London really felt. So, I think it is very close to the way Dickens imagined the story. One of the interesting things, by the way, just while you are collecting the … is that Dickens, when he came to do the readings toward the end of his life—and most of the end of his life he did these readings rather than actually write—he actually darkened the text. We can see that in selecting what he was going to read, and then in the way he read it, it became a darker text for him as he got older. Some of the comedy seemed to be eluding him in his own work as he came to the end of his life.

Lloyd: Good. Deryl.

Deryl Davis: Yes, some questions from the audience. The first one I would like to start with is akin to the question that just asked. That is, do you think the central message of A Christmas Carol has been diluted by the many adaptations, many of them unfaithful to the original?

Glavin: No! (Audience laughs) Not at all. I knew the great novelist, Muriel Spark, and I was asking her once about adaptations of her work, and she said the adaptation is somebody else’s business. You write the book, you make money by selling it to be adapted, and then you let the people adapt it as they will. And I think that the more Christmas Carols we have, the more versions of Christmas Carols we have, the better.

Rayner: I absolutely agree with that, and I think it is like a classic song or piece of music that is covered by many artists. What’s good will cling to it and what is not will fall away.

Davis: What was the Church of England doing to combat the poverty in English cities in the 1840s, and how did Dickens feel about capitalism?

Glavin: (Chuckles) Oh, well, Dickens was a capitalist. He wrote A Christmas Carol to make money. He was a bad capitalist; he lost money. There wasn’t at that point a market for Christmas books and Dickens decided that he was going to make money out of that market.

But he insisted that his publisher, Chatham, produce this ridiculously luxurious volume, and he wouldn’t listen when people explained that the things he was specifying, the kind of binding, the kind of paper, was going to make it impossible to make a profit. And that is exactly what happened.

But what ruined him was that somebody began to plagiarize it, so he insisted his lawyers start a lawsuit against the plagiarists, which Dickens won, but the process had bankrupted the plagiarists, so Dickens had to pay all the court costs.

So in fact Dickens lost money on Christmas Carol at the start. So he was a capitalist who didn’t know how capitalism worked. At least he didn’t know how to make it work for himself. But he certainly is not against capital, he is for reformed capital. Right? I mean, Scrooge doesn’t give up his business, right? He uses his business to do good.

The Church of England was slow to rise to the challenge of nineteenth-century social disorder. But its major thrust was to build churches for Parliament, to have huge church buildings to get more people into the churches. But you know England is full of [rival] churches in the nineteenth century. There is a Church of England, but there is a wide and strong evangelical movement. There are other kinds of movements. Mostly the history of the nineteenth century is about rivalries between churches trying to get congregations.

Davis: For Martin Rayner, Scrooge can at times verge on caricature in certain movies and on films. How do you avoid that in a work that is famous for its sentimentality?

Rayner: That is a really good question. It is the large problem with Scrooge. I think, by approaching the human side of him. Because caricature is the product, something we get from a series of things that are sent out.

I mean, it is like a well, yes, that is the best way I can describe it. If the things that are coming that are being projected out at the actor are as real as possible, then there is a subtle difference that can be detected, I think. I mean it is chemistry, I think.

But it is like somebody playing drunk on stage. That is a mistake. But if you are playing trying to stay sober, that is different. You won’t do caricature drunkenness if you are busy trying not to be drunk, and if you are being grumpy, or grouchy or unpleasant, or mean, for fear of something else.

In other words, you can’t play the thing itself. You can play the resistance to it, or play what causes that to become perceived by other people. So I think that you are safe if you are going for the human aspects of him. Here is a man who was probably an idealist and believed in the goodness of life, who then was turned away from that by circumstance. We don’t have all the motives, but certainly if you lose the person you love for some reason, and if you are afraid and insecure, then you tend to want to hoard things around you and keep things safe for yourself, and that leads to keeping money to yourself. I mean I am sure we all have that in us, don’t we?

We all have some Scrooge in us. Where we have these feelings of I must keep my little pile of coins otherwise it might be you know… So those aspects, if they are coming from a true place, I think, eventually project an idea that’s not caricature. It is a long winded way of saying it, but...

Lloyd: But you know, what strikes me in what you are saying is the psychological subtleties of the story going back into the spirit of Christmas Past is really probing in the way a therapist might probe. For what were the dynamics back there that shaped who he was, and by being able to go back and revisit those and revisit the emotions he experienced in that time? The [Gandhism?], the capacity to be freer of the places he had been trapped. So somehow, even in your acting, you want to capture the sense of his having been imprisoned in a set of reactions to responses but the beginning of the falling away of the manacles and a new possibility beginning to emerge.

Rayner: And at its simplest level people don’t say “Bah Humbug! That is not true.” That is caricature. But, if you say, “BAAH HUMMBUG!!” You are actually then saying something that means something. And if you take that whole way down to the bottom of the character, it is basically that. Yeah…

Davis: How did Dickens feelings about organized Christianity evolve, if they did, in his later life? Did he ever come to peace with it, or did he ever continue to feel that Christ must be rescued from organized Christianity?

Glavin: If you look at the last thing he writes, is this astonishing unfinished novel called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and this is actually the most religious of his novels, because it is set in Rochester Cathedral. At the center of it is a sort of unredeemed Scrooge, a man called John Jasper, who is the presenter, the man in charge of the cathedral music.

He is also an opium addict. He moves back and forth between these choral services in Rochester and opium dens in London. Probably by the end of the novel he is going to be revealed as the murderer of his nephew. Although the nephew gets murdered… Dickens died before we could figure out who actually does the murder.

But I think that what that really gets to is this terrible kind of terrible tension inside Dickens. On the one hand, wanting a kind of system of belief, wanting a kind of order outside himself that could be relied on as something [that] would produce the salvation that he was hoping to feel on his own life.

On the other hand this increasing sense of himself as an obsessive-compulsive, driven person who was gradually turning all the people around him away from himself. So I think that Dickens’ life just got darker and darker, and that what you are really looking at in 1843 is a man on the cusp. He still can look back and recreate a kind of youthful energy, a kind of youthful optimism. He sees a kind of potential darkness at the end. He sees the need for both a personable and an historic redemption from that darkness. By the early 1860s, when he dies, he is much more on the dark side, if you want to go back to where the force is. The force gets Dickens by the end, I think.

Davis: Which of his works did Dickens himself find the most satisfying?

Glavin: David Copperfield. David Copperfield, that was his favorite. He always said that is the one he loved best. It is about himself. You know Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield. It is the life that he thought he could have led if he hadn’t been Charles Dickens.

Davis: A Christmas Carol has a lot to do with family, or lack of family and isolation. Through the Christmas Carol, was Dickens trying to say anything about family dynamics and social intelligence?

Glavin: Wow! Social intelligence is a terrifically interesting idea to bring up in terms of Dickens because, as I said earlier, Dickens certainly, firmly understands that the self does not exist outside the self’s society. And it is only in terms of interactions with others.

Dickens, again, had another… everything with Dickens is doubled. So on the one hand, Dickens is a great believer in family life. On the other, his own family was a source of endless difficulty, frustration, disappointment to himself, beginning with his parents and going on to his children. So I think that Dickens ideally would have said that… What Dickens said, to be frank, was you have got to abandon the family you were born to and find the family you need.

And in novel after novel after novel, what happens is, people are very badly parented in Dickens—very badly parented. They need to find surrogate parents. They need to find surrogate siblings. They need to find a world, a house, a place where family can be recreated. In Dickens, it is never likely to be the family you were born into. But if you don’t find the family you need, then you wind up miserable, avaricious, miser with no life at all. So the challenge is to invent your own family.

Davis: For Martin. Have you played other roles written by Dickens? And if so, which ones, and do you have a favorite theatrical role?

Rayner: No, I have never… Oh! Wait a minute. I have. I played Pip in Great Expectations. Way, way back in weekly rep in England. Weekly rep is when you do a play every week. It is an amazing treadmill, not unlike the Dickensian treadmill… But my very first job as an actor was to be on the prompt book, getting the props, helping paint the sets, and acting. And we would do a play every week. And one of those plays was Great Expectations, and I played the young Pip. There was another actor in there playing the old Pip. So, that is my other Dickensian role. I would love to play Fagin. I think that is a fantastic role. There are a lot of Dickensian roles that I could think of, but I don’t think anyone has done better than Alec Guinness with that. So that’s …

Lloyd: We are going to need to wrap things up. So can I throw one more question to both of you? Here we are Christmas time 2008, you had read and thought about… in this particular year, a quick word from each of you about what you think A Christmas Carol has to say to us at this moment in 2008.

Glavin: I think the key line is where Scrooge understands that he has to live in the past, the present, and the future at once. That’s a challenge for us because, as I think we have just come to understand, we have lived too much in the present for the past decade or so. And lived only for the present and not paid enough attention to both the future and the past. So I think the challenge is to remember this moment when Scrooge understands what it is about. It’s this living in three dimensions simultaneously.

Rayner: And for me very personally, I believe that this nation which I have just become a member of this last year is in dire need of hope and redemption and on so many levels. It is not just the financials but the spiritual, civility, and the way that the things are happening in this culture. I believe that this new president is going to have a tremendous trickle-down effect on many, many aspects of that. And, I believe that redemption is upon us.

Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation. Our Forum is going to take a break for a couple of weeks. We will be back on January 11with a very well known Episcopal preacher and writer, Barbara Brown Taylor.

We would love for you linger for some coffee and conversation in the west end of the Cathedral, the entrance end, and at 11:15 we start our service. We would love for you to be here for that. Please join me in thanking Martin Rayner and John Glavin.