Hi. I'm Owen Teale.
and I'm playing Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.
We love a ghost story.
It's a ghost story.
It's the best ghost story.
Then I realised this really is a show for families
that they can share, and of Christmas,
ultimately.
Come and get a bit of Christmas.
For me, definitely
this was the combination of the team that is putting this together.
Matthew Warchus is the director,
Rob Howell is the designer,
the input of Jack Thorne to come together with one of the greatest
iconic stories of the Victorian age that still stands true today.
It's a bit of a Christmas staple.
I found it irresistible.
This production hit me
so fully in the heart
and in the centre of my chest.
You're just swept along from moment to moment.
It's almost not a play.
It's an event that happens every night with a room full of people.
The Old Vic manages to be the heart of a community.
I think it's got the most wonderful atmosphere to walk into.
The bells.
The bells are wonderful, and there's a word in the Welsh language,
which is 'hwyl', and hwyl can mean great spirit.
And this hwyl to me is very much brought about by a collective.
So it happens when people sing.
It's about losing yourself in the great.
You kind of go into another level of existence.
And this show has that.
It has the hwyl.
It comes together.
We are in the middle of Southwark where Charles Dickens lived
and extracted from this very area the stories of injustice
that he saw, of great characters and they're alive and well.
This is like the beating heart of Southwark, when they're doing this play.
It's got all its past, present
and future in the moment.
It makes it very, very special to do it right here where the story was born.
To be able to learn from your mistakes.
To be able to see more clearly, to have compassion
for your fellow traveller,
as it says in the play, that everybody is dealing with something.
Every person you meet is dealing
with some degree of joy
and sadness, grief and all the things that a human life is.
That compassion. That.
That leads to charity.
And these are hard times we're living through at the moment.
This production is inspiring about those things, and I truly believe
it has the power to trigger change for good.
All the treats. I don't want to spoil it.
It all happens here at The Old Vic,
it does.
He's never without the sense of humour.
The sense of ridiculousness at times of human nature,
also that we are capable of change.
It is beautifully modern.
I don't know anybody that's seen this show that hasn't been unutterably moved.
Oh. Got to remember the exact line.
I'm learning my lines at the moment.
Come on, I can cheat.
And Scrooge says,
"But you think I can change him?
This man", and she says
"Of course you can.
Change is within us all.
It's why life is such a thrill."
And then yet again, cut
beautifully. "Well, I must be getting on.
My turkey's in a parlour state."
The sort of sublime to the absolutely
every day that we live through. The combination of those two lines.
I adore. You know.
Thank you, Jack Thorne.
These ghosts.
If I had to be visited
by one of the ghosts, it would have to be the one from the future.
Would I refrain from asking them the lottery numbers for next Saturday?
I'd like to think I would, but
yeah.
Yeah.
I'd forget about all that. One on its own
doesn't work. You've got to have all three.
You've either got to go, go big or go home.
When it comes to spirits visiting you.
Family tradition.
Okay. Bit haphazard with the meal, I enjoy
all that. And there is a drink as well that my mother used to drink.
And I don't even think it's very nice, but it's like a fun thing to do.
And my wife says, "No, no, you don't want to drink that."
It's called a, is it Snowball?
with
yellow eggnog
or something and topped up with Babycham or
lemonade or something and with a cherry in it.
And then we would play a song.
Jump the Line by Harry Belafonte.
And yet again, it's that thing of hwyl, it's that thing of bringing people together.
Once you hear the music, you have to run around the house
and get hold of whatever instruments you can.
Nobody really plays
music proficiently in the house,
apart from my mother-in-law. I haven't got my phone with me.
Here we go.
You'll know it.
Come on.
A lot of memories,
especially my father-in-law, he used to do to the spoons,
he'd grabbed the spoons and he'd take them. Things that will make a noise.
There's an old rain stick that somebody's brought back,
and you have to join in with this song and be utterly uproarious and silly.
That's what it is, is to uphold certain traditions within the family.
That's it. That's Christmas.