A Christmas Carol

Join the Cohen-Wingfield Duo and actor Sophie Max in Trinity College's atmospheric Old Combination Room for Charles Dickens’s beloved ghost story, ‘A Christmas Carol’, which is recreated as a musical drama, in which the narrative is spoken to the accompaniment of music for violin and piano. This genre, called ‘melodrama’ in the nineteenth century, was immensely popular throughout Europe when Dickens was alive. The show, lasting about 70 minutes, has a script adapted from Dickens's 1843 text and an original score by Paul Wingfield, composer of the hugely successful melodrama Einstein’s Violin. The score is immersed in Dickens’ own musical world, combining Victorian Christmas music with the sounds of nineteenth-century supernatural opera, of which Dickens was a devotee (he was a particular fan of Gounod’s Faust). This vibrant reimagining of Dickens’s novella thus both transports the listener to the author’s own cultural surroundings and provides an original perspective on a timeless literary classic. The perfect start to the Christmas season; brought to you by the trio whose previous production, 'Pride and Prejudice in Words and Music', was widely acclaimed and was performed at sold-out venues in London, Bath, Cambridge and Chawton (in Jane Austen's own sitting room).