THEATRE REVIEW

DECEMBER 2025 | Volume 258

 

Turns out Dickens’ A Christmas Carol wasn’t a one-off. He wrote four more Christmas stories in the 1840s, including The Cricket on the Hearth, which was just as popular in its time. United Players artistic director Sarah Rodgers and actor Naomi Wright have adapted the story for the stage with original music and songs by Christopher King. This is its premiere.

It’s a sweet, sentimental comic fable, imaginatively adapted and directed with flair by Rodgers, featuring some sterling performances, spectacular costumes by Mara Gottler, and clever set and props with handsome paintings by Sheila White. King’s music is very fine, and the show feels like it wants to be a musical.All it lacks are stronger singing voices.

The story centres on the modest home of the Peerybingles, Mary (Emma Houghton) and John (Charlie Deagnon); their maid Tilly (Cassie Unger), their dog Boxer (Vincent Keats), and the title cricket (adorable violinist December Goodkey), considered a good luck charm in the family hearth.

They are visited by their poor neighbours, toymaker Caleb (Gordon Law) and his blind daughter Bertha (Pippa Cochrane). Caleb’s boss, the wealthy, pompous, grouchy toy merchant Tackleton (Kazz Leskard), is the Scrooge character.

The plot, such as it is, concerns Tackleton’s desire to marry young May (Unger again), which upsets poor Bertha. The appearance of a mysterious old stranger (Toby Verchere) upends Tackleton’s would-be marriage and the entire Peerybingle household until mysteries are revealed and the Christmas spirit restored.

We’re continually reminded of the prose fiction origins of the play as characters take turns narrating, sometimes referring to their own dialogue in the third-person (“she said”). There’s a lovely formality to the storytelling, as well as some nifty nods to the magic of theatre: a hobbyhorse pulls a wagon with open umbrellas for wheels; a young man (Verchere) dons a wig and cloak onstage to transform into an old man; the talking dog Boxer (Keats) pops on a bonnet to become May’s fussy mother.

The actors playing the Peerybingles, Caleb, and Bertha—the moral centres of the story—nicely convey the goodness and love that their characters are constantly described as embodying. But in this adaptation the stars are the oddballs.

Keats is an acrobatic comic wonder as Boxer the family dog, racing around on all fours, doing flips and curling up to be petted by master and mistress, all the while articulating his canine observations. And he’s just as good as May’s sour old mother. Unger is very funny as the maid Tilly, a nervous young woman with fascinating tics, manhandling the Peerybingles’ infant (a doll thankfully) and continually avoiding, by inches, disaster.

Leskard’s nasty Tackleton (“Why don’t you kill that cricket!”) steals the show with a big, beautifully precise performance both physically and vocally. He also gets King’s best song, a Kurt Weillian tune about how children need to be shown that life is short and cruel, which he sings with glee as well as with the strength and clarity lacking in some of the other individual vocal performances.

A show with heart and great theatrical imagination, this is another winner for United Players.

 

 

 

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