The latest offering from Oxford's Creation Theatre Company, a production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol , is bringing festive cheer to the city's theatregoers in high style at the company's winter venue at the BMW plant in Cowley. A polished production with a fine cast, the show incorporates singing, dancing, thrills, nostalgia, and a gentle, easily grasped moral message. Perfect for a bit of seasonal relaxation.

Abigail Anderson's wonderful direction has ensured the balance between Christmas spirit and schmaltz, humour and moralising, supernatural spine-tingling and downright scariness. Eerie visitations move easily into enthusiastic festivities and emotional interplay, and the whole thing comes together with a great sense of energy and fun.

Matthew Hendrickson, as Scrooge, manages to capture the humanity and humour of a character who has become a caricature in the popular imagination, here portraying a man gone astray returning to the values he once held, rather than a firmly mean-spirited soul mysteriously 'cured' overnight. It is easy to believe both in how Scrooge has become the man he is, and in his redemption. The delightful Cratchit family, headed by a cunningly cast Bob (Christopher Naylor), seem a little further from reality as we know it, but that doesn't stop us feeling for their sad lives of poverty and dogged cheerfulness. Anderson has gone for the stylised rather than the sinister in her portrayal of the three Christmas spirits, which is possibly a good idea in view of the well played but rather distractingly decorated and frankly hale 'Marley's Ghost' (Tim Funnell). The closeness of the audience, otherwise a bonus, is too much for concrete ghosts, no matter how good the lighting

All the cast deserve mention; most of them playing multiple roles in a very confined space, they succeeded in bringing new life to a familiar story, and in holding the attention of the thirty or so schoolchildren in the next row whom I had (unjustly) viewed with such apprehension when I came in.

A Christmas Carol may not be one of the deepest productions you'll see this year, but it'll certainly be one of the most entertaining. High on feelgood factor: light-hearted, beautifully paced and well acted, it should warm your heart, feast your eyes, and keep your kids quiet. So, cheer up, it's Christmas, and I'll recommend this production as a great way to get into the spirit of things.

Susie Cogan, 1/12/04