The Old Vic’s A Christmas Carol returns from 12 November 2026 to 9 January 2027, two hours with a twenty-minute interval.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks in the autumn of 1843, in debt, published it himself at his own expense, and sold out the first run of six thousand copies by Christmas Eve. He made almost nothing from it because he had priced it too cheaply and bound it too well. What he did do was invent, more or less single-handedly, the version of Christmas that the English-speaking world now observes: the family dinner, the charity, the emphasis on the poor, the idea that the season carries an obligation.
Jack Thorne adapted it for The Old Vic in 2017 and it has come back every year since, which makes it the theatre’s own property rather than a commercial producer’s — a difference that matters, because the profits stay in the building. Thorne, who also wrote the Harry Potter play, makes Scrooge’s childhood the engine of the adaptation rather than the ghosts.
Matthew Warchus’s production returns from Thursday 12 November 2026 to Saturday 9 January 2027, roughly two hours with an interval, previews from £14.50. The auditorium is rebuilt for it: a walkway down the middle, the audience on both sides, handbells, and food handed out. That reconfiguration is what the theatre means by immersive, and it is the reason this one is not interchangeable with the other Carols in town.