What the Dickens do we have here? A Christmas Carol with guest appearances by a gallery of famous voices including Alan Bennett, Robin Williams, Alastair Sim, Kenneth Williams and Homer Simpson? It sounds like a great idea, and impressionist Steve Nallon (he supplied the voices for the Queen Mum and Maggie Thatcher on Spitting Image) is the man with the skills to do it. Unfortunately, though, the evening doesn't really work, simply because all those star turns get in the way of the story.
Initially, the show has considerable novelty value and it feels quite fun, but you soon get used to the fact that Wallace and Gromit, John Hurt and Delia Smith are going to pop up - even if Nallon succeeds in cooking the latter's goose expertly. After a while you wish that David Attenborough would stop observing Scrooge in his natural habitat and that Nallon would just get on and tell us what happened next to Scrooge.
Although it is difficult to imagine that there is anyone left in Britain who doesn't know the plot of A Christmas Carol, such a viewer would have a pretty hard job following Scrooge's transformation from skinflint to Tiny Tim's very own Santa. And unless you are a devotee of UK Gold and daytime television, you might have difficulty putting a face to quite a lot of the voices.
In the end, the evening is broken-backed because Dickens was a better scriptwriter than Nallon, and also told better jokes. It would be infinitely more enjoyable if Nallon gave us A Christmas Carol straight, using his skills to provide the voices. In trying to offer more, this production ends up being considerably less.
· Until January 3. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
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