Mark: I felt that Christmas Carol had a message that it was still very important for everyone had a go at understanding if you like. It' s about humanity, I mean it' s set around a Christian Christmas and really it follows a humanitarian tale. It' s about someone who' s given a second chance and I think we all like the idea of having a second chance. But ultimately it' s about redemption through helping other people.

Interviewer: And what were the influences and inspirations that made you decide to set the production in South Africa?

Mark: I first went to South Africa eight years ago to do a theatre production and I fell in love with the country. And it seemed to me that the difference in wealth in South Africa was similar to the difference in wealth that existed in 19th-century London when Dickens was writing. You have a huge disparity from people who are terribly rich to people who are very poor. And so that helped us get into the story quite easily. Also that he wrote the story after he' d been down a mine and seen children working and the mines South Africa are still way behind the rest of the world in terms of health and safety issues and there are a lot of similarities.

Interviewer: To pursue that a bit, Dickens wrote Christmas Carol as a serial criticism of child poverty, so how relevant is that today?

Mark: Very relevant to us in South Africa, extremely so. Especially with the AIDS epidemic which is taking out a whole generation and so unfortunately children are often having to be brought up by their grandparents because both parents die. So it leaves a huge legacy of poverty, it isn' t just the people who are dying but the generation that' s left who are going to miss their parents which is a major problem in South Africa. And the number of orphans is growing day by day, and so its a very serious and very real issue in South Africa.

Interviewer: There' s one scene in the play which is a very powerful scene where the actors symbolically drop the baby, I wonder if you could talk about that scene.

Mark: We tried to, we looked for something, it' s difficult because you have to be very careful that you don' t appear to preach an audience otherwise they' re going to switch off. So we tried to find a theatrical metaphor for, in the original book Dicken' s about the ghosts all around a mother and a child. The ghosts of people who haven' t helped other people on earth, they' re all around this mother and child who are sitting on the street, and they can' t help her and so we looked, and we just extracted some statistics and the frightening fact it that a child dies every five seconds through want or disease. So it was important for the audience to understand that and that that was part of the background of the story.

Interviewer: You' ve transposed the gender of some of the characters, what was your intention in doing that?

Mark: I think partly to show it' s a universal condition, that you can be unsentimental and brutal even if you' re a woman, in the same way you can if you' re a man. But I suppose the most important reason for doing it was that in Victorian London a white male was the dominant figure, and fast in South Africa the black female is becoming the dominant figure. So if you like it was transposing the power structure, where the power is in fact.

Interviewer: Although Tiny Tim' s transposition of gender has a completely...

Mark: ...has a completely different message. We wanted to preserve the similarity of sex between Tiny Tim and Scrooge. So once we decided to change Scrooge, we changed Tiny Tim.

Interviewer: You' re artistic collaborator on the production, what did this role involve?

Charles: Well Mark Dornford-May and I have been working sort of hand-in-glove for the last seven or eight years, probably longer than that, certainly the last seven or eight years in South Africa. What happened originally, about 2000, 2001 was that he and I got this unique opportunity to go out to South Africa together and form a completely new company of South African talent, to provide a platform for the amazing jewels of vocal talent in particular which is to be found there. I mean I would put my hand on my heart and say South Africa is the most musical country in the world. So we were there like a shot. We went right around the country, usually in very remote places and we auditioned over 2000 people, and pulled together a company of 40 people. 40 of the most gifted individuals most of whom had never been in a theatre before, but all of whom had been performing to an incredibly high standard since pretty much the age when they' d learnt to walk. So the love affair with South Africa and working very closely with Mark was fundamental all the way through. Now we came to the current production of Christmas Carol I took slightly more of a back seat, although I composed a good deal of the main tunes of the show which we superimposed. People on the ground developed these tunes and rehearsed around them and I just kind of dipped in an out when I was able to just keep an eye on things.

Interviewer: You wrote that one of Dickens' fables had been invigorated by the cultural shift in this production, could you expand a little on that?

Michael: I think what happens in this production is that Dickens' fiction, which is a universal story, but Dickens' fiction becomes rooted in a world of African fact. That to me was the really startling thing about it. The story of Scrooge is widely known, obviously, but by being transplanted to South Africa, and by the hero becoming a woman and by her being someone who has given up family and singing career to become head of a mining concern, what you got was a sort of re-thinking of the story so that it became part of South Africa' s current life. I mean the obvious point to make is that AIDS became the key factor in this. In other words, Dickens' story was preserved in outline but it was related to what is actually happening, has been happening, in South Africa for several years. That to me was the whole achievement of the whole theatre enterprise.

Pauline: In Christmas Carol I play the character of Scrooge. The story is still the same, basically, as the original Scrooge that English people would know, but it' s basically, took a turn, and it' s looking at Scrooge as a South African businesswoman, if you like. I think basically because nowadays, you know these days there' s a lot of empowering women, the government empowering women and black empowerment. So there' s lots of women coming up as entrepreneurs, as businesswomen, you know things like that. So for us it was important that we feature a South African woman in that sense.

Interviewer: And what about... the play has transposed the gender of your character, because Scrooge is usually played as a male part, I wonder if you can say something about that, and what the transposition means in terms of the story?

Pauline: Probably it' s what I said, but maybe I didn' t say it clearly. I don' t know why they decided to make Scrooge a woman in the first place. What I was told was you' re gonna play Scrooge. I was not happy, I was not happy at all because if you like, Scrooge would be my first role on stage, my first speaking role and to me it was quite long for me as my first one. But I think that the idea behind, not that there weren' t any good men in the company who could play Scrooge as men, but because of what' s happening in South Africa at the moment, you know as I said before, the Black economic empowerment, the empowering of women, women taking charge, women not just wanting to be housewives but women wanting to be out there, do not what men do, but do what they want to do, what they would like to do. You know, instead of men telling them you have to do this and you have to do that. So it' s women taking a stand, so in this Christmas Carol, that' s exactly what Scrooge is doing, at the same time as playing this mean and... people see it as mean and... but if you look at it, yes she' s mean, but there' s more to her meaness than what people see. Sometimes people can grow up to be things they didn' t really want to be but because of circumstances they were forced into those situations. So I think that Scrooge' s background shaped her into what she ended up being in the end, because you know, if you look at the story we don' t see anything, we don' t hear anything about the parents being, we know that the father had, you know, been working all the time, but we don' t see any family background where they' re mean and rich and not giving to the poor. So I think if you look at it in the South African context you' ll say basically she had to be, because she was forced into a position where she was in a male dominated business world, where is she wanted to survive, she had to become a man herself. And so she, instead of being herself, in a way, she forgot about her values, and sort of thought men haven' t got values. You know, you know, it' s sort of confusion, she got into confusion and all those circumstances of Scrooge being mean really.

Interviewer: What did the South African setting bring to the story?

David: I think the main thing it brought was the kind of immediacy the story must have had when it was originally published because one of the reasons Mark and I fell for the idea really quickly was if you transpose the Victorian setting there were these very extreme disparities of poverty and wealth... right up against each other. And put it in South Africa now, it fits very very well firstly, and secondly what also happens, what frequently happens at a time when people have got wealthy very quickly through a big social or political or historical change, like in England in the middle part of the 19th century, is that you get this real moral struggle amongst people about just who they are, and what their responsibilities to other people are. And Scrooge in the original story, in the original Dickens, is a man who has distanced himself morally from his community. And the same sort of situations and problems that arise, are very very common in South Africa now because some people have made an enormous amount of money very fast and they want to hold on to it! And the only way they can hold on to it is to de-ly the lengths of kinship that are very very powerful and this causes all sorts of real dilemmas both for the people trying to keep the money and people trying to get it off them! So, one of the things that setting it in South Africa now gave us, was a way of re-thinking the story so that it was as if it had been written yesterday. The reality of the tensions of the story were very clear, very powerful.