BY DANIEL JUPP

Last week I went to a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Christmas Carol. It was a production that mixed original modern content with material based directly on Dickens’ own work. 

It was a strange experience that I think said far more about modern Britain than Victorian Britain. 

First, the quality of the staging, lighting, acting, singing and dancing were all undeniable. In that sense it was spectacular, with wonderful choreography and skill in every aspect on display. Theatre is one of those things, like Royal ceremony, that we seem to do better than anyone else and never seem to get bad at. If we are reduced to living in caves and licking moss from stones, as appears to be the intent of current policy, there will be some little New Stone Age Brits who are flawless, even if starving, singers and actors. 

Second, and here we see our modern ways intrude, it was relentlessly and even absurdly diverse. The cast was a UN assembly, with carefully moderated quantities of white, black, brown, olive and yellow. It included an actor who was a cripple (not the one playing a cripple), an actress dwarf and another actress in a wheelchair. All of those people were, by the way, fine singers and actors and choreography was beautifully conducted in ways that included them seamlessly in dance scenes. They were tokens without being tokens, they had equal skill and presence but….at the same time everyone who isn’t woke knows why they were picked and what ‘anti-ableist message’ was being delivered. 

I somewhat cynically remarked to my wife that the role of Tiny Tim presents a missed opportunity to give a dying consumptive crippled child a role. The director made do with a little black boy, who was the son of a white Mrs Cratchet and an Asian Mr Cratchet. This was one of many uncommented upon miracles in the Cratchet family alone, perhaps reaching their height of absurdity when we discovered that the extremely white Ade Edmundson, playing Scrooge, had, as a child, been black. We were never told what supernatural event changed his race but it seems to have occurred with puberty. 

In its wokeness then, the production demanded that biological reality in the real world, and the realistic demographics of the time being displayed, be ignored, but at the same time this colour and context blindness was the result of a hyper consciousness of race and a desire to make race an issue for the audience. It was simultaneously saying don’t notice and make sure you do notice regarding the same thing. The incongruity, political motivation, realistic unlikelihood, jarring anachronism of it should not be seen, but the virtue, the message, the self-satisfied woke command of it all should be both seen and obeyed. 

There is suspension of disbelief, and then there is wilful absurdity for a political point scoring exercise. For what is, essentially, propaganda.

At times this dropped even the semblance of being about the time of Dickens, as when arguments were made in favour of keeping people with giant flat screen TVs on welfare because their plight is akin to that of people in a Victorian workhouse, with the callous dinner party Victorian being the modern rightist who wonders why we are housing and feeding thousands of Ukrainians but not our own service veterans.

The intrusion of the modern reached its crescendo with a crass anti Boris joke, which predictably drew delighted laughter from an audience who primarily shared, to my poorer eye, the class and wealth of Boris. Somehow being left wingers at the theatre magically insulated them from the class criticism they applied to others. 

It hardly needs to be said to anyone who has attended the theatre that the brown, black, white, crippled, whole, proudly disabled, Christian, Muslim, Hindu cast all, save one, had the same achingly middle class accent.

Diversity is a race issue precisely to make you forget that it’s actually a class issue.

These people rail against Victorian injustices to excuse their own. They sneer at Victorian privilege so that you don’t notice theirs. They pretend it is racial so they can keep ignoring the white working class. 

At one stage a ‘Victorian’ laughed about not extending the franchise because poor people might vote for the wrong things. How many of the actors and audience, I wondered, had that supposedly Victorian attitude to Brexit? I’d guess as well that most of them were fans of electric cars, and as uncaring about the black child slaves in mines securing the components of those vehicles as any Victorian regarding child labour. The play uses Victorian excerpts criticising child labour without apparently being aware that the people who ended it, as well as the people who used it, were Victorians. The whole thing is suffused with an ignorant arrogance towards the past, and an equal selectivity regarding the present. 

In showing their version of Dickens, they showed me much about their version of today, with all its unwarranted superiority, self-blindness and pious hypocrisy.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex.