In Steve Nallon’s Christmas Carol the dramatic and theatrical focus is on rekindling the imagination, hopes and yearning of “the dreamer who stopped dreaming”, to borrow a phrase direct from this adaptation. ‘Dreaming’ here becomes not only one of the ways of explaining what is happening to Scrooge in the story but also an expression of his heart and mind that he has been missing out on all these years. In essence, Steve Nallon’s Christmas Carol is saying that if you cut yourself off from this aspect of your life then it is likely that you will lose other human connections as well.
This adaptation represents a very personal perspective on the story and that is the need for the child always to imagine and play, and further the need for the grown-up child in the adult never quite to lose that child like level of ‘fancy’, to use the Dickens nineteenth-century expression.