So many adaptations of Dickens’ novella are staged each winter that attention comes to be focused on the ways in which they have chosen to diverge, supposedly for the sake of novelty, from the story we know. David Edgar’s new version for the RSC is novel indeed: it goes back beyond the somewhat sanitised version in popular consciousness to what Dickens actually wrote, and why.

Dickens was moved to respond to a harrowing parliamentary report on child labour, but switched from his original intention of a pamphlet to a fictional examination and indictment. Scrooge is not such an inhuman slavemaster himself (other than to Bob Cratchit), but a personification of the grasping social system which thinks nothing of working its poor till they drop. Conversely, when Edgar anatomises various Christmas activities, he emphasises that the core of the festival in this conception is social compassion, a coming together in even modest and temporary communal extravagance. Both aspects meet in the Cratchit household, where a mouthful or two of Christmas pudding coincides with talk of hiving the children off to various sweatshops simply to scrape a subsistence.

This sounds like a worthy grind, but the reality is far from it. Rachel Kavanaugh’s production regards the bleakness steadily, but is also filled with visual magic (literally so: Ben Hart is the production illusionist). Faces and figures take shape in smoke and flame, entire landscapes explode out of background-projected cloud and the whole evening has a gloriously fluid feeling. Musical and choreographed sequences flow in and out, and the figures of Dickens (Nicholas Bishop) and his editor marshal events along and sometimes even stand in for a younger Scrooge while the excellent Phil Davis observes the visions conjured up by the three Christmas spirits (foremost amongst them Brigid Zengeni as an irrepressible Christmas Present).

Edgar even manages simultaneously to lampoon Dickensian character names and our absurd contemporary notions of social activity: Mr Fezziwig’s party is populated by the likes of Mrs Snapchat, young Master Tinder and Herr Uber. It’s good for a chuckle, but also serves as one more reminder that Dickens’ view of Christmas was more than merely sentimental, and that we need just as keenly today to reanimate that sense of mutuality, of “God bless us, every one”.

Written for the Financial Times.