“A CHRISTMAS Carol” is soon coming to the Canberra Rep stage with a German twist fit to warm the hearts of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. 

Directed by Antonia Kitzel, who only came here from Frankfurt in 2015, it’ll be Rep’s first production after lockdown.

I caught up with Kitzel while she and her tight cast of five actors were rehearsing their multiple characters around the clock after getting the go-ahead for the live performance season.

“We thought we should do something entertaining as a final show… It couldn’t be ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, which is now postponed to next year, then we thought we might do something rehearsed and streamed, but with the lifting of lockdowns we didn’t have to do that.”

Looking around for something uplifting to do, Kitzel and Rep thought of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, staged as a Christmas present to the public with tickets very cheap – only $20 a head.

And they won’t spend much money, with a simple set and the costumes sourced from Rep’s extensive wardrobe.

Serendipitously, Kitzel already had a script in mind, an adaptation by American-born comedian and theatre artist Abigail Paul, first staged in 2015 by the Theatre Language Studio Frankfurt that Kitzel co-founded with Paul.

The script, featuring a narrator and four other actors who play 30 parts, sticks closely to Dickens, Kitzel tells me, with just a few outdated colloquialisms changed for ease of speaking.

Since arriving here six years ago, Kitzel has been a familiar figure on stage, most recently as the wife in “The Governor’s Family”, where her German ancestry came in handy.

She moved here for personal reasons and her foresighted partner, fearing that she might be like a fish out of water in Canberra if she didn’t find some theatre, signed her up for Rep even before she got here.

She settled into the ACT quickly and says: “I really like Canberra, I know a lot of people don’t like it, but to me it’s not too big and it’s got all the things that I think are important – and the people at Rep have been lovely.”

As well, there could hardly be a better way of getting fluent in spoken Australian English than joining a theatre group, as she found.

Kitzel does not shy away from the almost saccharine, heart-warming content of “A Christmas Carol”.

“It’s a reminder about what is important in life, what we should watch out for and, of course, there’s the ultimate redemption for Scrooge, a miserable old man who has forgotten that you can have fun and enjoy life,” she says.

For those not in the know, the old skinflint John Ebenezer Scrooge is a byword for miserliness, described by Dickens as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner.”

In the play, Scrooge is visited by the spirits of Christmases past, present and future as well as the ghost of another miserable old man, his late business partner, Jacob Marley, as a reminder that some things that aren’t tangible are more important than money – love, for one. 

Kitzel endorses Rep’s description of her actors as a “stellar cast”. She, after all, auditioned them.

She praises Saban Berrell, who plays Scrooge and who was most recently seen in Rep’s “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” and “Rope”, as well as the narrator, Alexandra Pelvin, who will also be directing “Hotel Sorrento” for the company next year. 

Then there are the three remaining versatile ensemble members who play all the other characters – Amy Crawford, last seen in “Brighton Beach Memoirs”, Sally Rynveld, who hasn’t been in a Rep show since “Under Milk Wood” years ago and a younger actor, John Whinfield, all of whom “move seamlessly from one character to another in a blink of an eye.”

Any favourite characters for Kitzel? 

Well, there’s Scrooge himself, his fiancé, the three spirits of Christmases, Bob Cratchit the lowly clerk and most important of all, since it is a key moment for Scrooge when he realises that this little boy might die, Bob’s son Tiny Tim, immortalised in his famous line, “God bless us every one!”

“A Christmas Carol”, November 26-December 5, book at canberrarep.org.au or 6257 1950.