Christmas Carol Goes Wrong

Christmas Carol Goes Wrong hands Dickens to an amateur drama society with far more ambition than competence, then watches the set, the cast and the script come apart around them. The company is determined to get to the end. The evening has other ideas. Everything that can fail does fail, in sequence, on purpose.

Scrooge is played by whoever is still standing. The ghosts arrive late, early, or in the wrong scene entirely. Doors stick, flats collapse, props go off without warning, and one performer ends up covering three parts because another has been knocked out cold. Underneath all of it the actual story keeps grinding forward, which is the real joke: the worse the production gets, the more stubbornly the text refuses to stop.

It comes from the company behind The Play That Goes Wrong, who have spent more than a decade building farce out of theatrical disaster. Nothing that looks accidental is - the whole thing is choreographed to the frame, and the demands on the performers are closer to stunt work than to comic acting. The piece began as a one-off television special before being rebuilt for the stage.

The comedy is physical, loud and relentless, and it reaches a wider age range than most farce because the jokes land visually before they land verbally. It has an odd second effect as well: after being taken apart from the first minute, the story is somehow still moving by the end.

It suits families, office groups and anyone who has ever been involved in an amateur production. Live is the only way it works - the near misses are genuinely near, the timing lives in the room, and a crowd laughing at a disaster together is the entire point.