Veteran Canadian actor Rod Beattie, best known for his portrayal of Walt Wingfield in the Wingfield series of plays, will be in Thompson Nov. 22 to play several other well-known characters as he brings his one-man version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to the Letkemann Theatre as part of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre (MTC) annual regional tour.
Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future are all familiar to Beattie, who has performed radio readings of A Christmas Carol in the past, but he always felt the scripts weren’t ideal, which was what spurred him to author his own adaptation.
“I’ve done a number of the CBC readings of it and I’ve always been dissatisfied with the script,” he told the Nickel Belt News. “I just thought, after I’d done one of these readings almost two years ago now, somebody should write a proper version of this and I thought, ‘Geez, I could probably do that so I did.’”
As for many others, the tale of the miserly Scrooge’s transformation has always been synonymous with Christmas for Beattie.
“I’ve known the Dickens book since I was born practically,” he says. “A Christmas Carol started for me with my father reading it to us when we were little, little kids and my recollection of that is that it was the highlight of the holiday season. He did it in stages of five nights because we were so little I guess we couldn’t sit still for that long and I’ve loved it ever since.”
His version was first performed in London, Ont. last year and the quality of the source material made adapting it for the stage a pleasure.
“In Dickens’s writing, not just A Christmas Carol but in most of his writing, the reader’s imagination is the most powerful force in it,” Beattie says. “He has a very vivid sense of imagery and of course in A Christmas Carol it’s a ghost story. The atmosphere of the supernatural is something that he’s brilliant at conveying with his words. It’s always seemed to me that the narrative parts of the book are the best parts and in many productions they just get left out entirely.”
As for making it a one-man production, Beattie says it’s something he’s done a lot and is well-suited to.
“The one-person thing is the way I’ve been doing shows for 35 years now so it seemed an obvious thing,” he said. “I figured if there was anybody who was appropriate for the task it’s probably somebody who’s been used to doing that. In my version there is a narrator, as there is with the Wingfield plays, and then he becomes the other characters and does the scenes between the narration.”
Beattie has done the Royal MTC multiple times before, performing the Wingfield plays and a production of Ed’s Garage in Thompson four years ago.
“Touring is my favourite thing to do and the travelling part of my work is my least favourite part of it,” he says, looking ahead at 24 performances in 24 communities in 33 days. “I’ve often thought that if the audience would come to me then I’d be quite cheerful about doing it all the time. I’ve travelled so much over the past 35 years that I have a very vivid sense of wanting to be home but that’s not the nature of our business. The audience doesn’t come to you. You have to go where they are and I accept that. We’ve always been the rogues and vagabonds have always been on the road. Over the time that I’ve been in the business there’s been more and more, especially younger people, who agitate for and sometimes insist on what they call the right to work and perform in their home bases and I understand that because if you want to have an actual life and a family and so on it’s very, very hard to maintain that and organize it if you’re on the road all the time but it just isn’t the way it works.”
Despite the amount of travel, Beattie says he’s excited about the tour.
“I look forward to being back in Manitoba too in spite of the weather and everything else,” he said. “It’s a great place.”
