17/12/2025
Tonight we will perform ‘Humbug!’ for the 150th time.
That number still feels slightly surreal. When we first made this show in 2017, it was meant to be a one-off Christmas experiment - something scrappy and joyful to animate a freezing medieval building for a few weeks in December.
There was no grand plan behind it. No roadmap, no five-year vision, no expectation that it would return. Just a willingness to give it a go and see what happened.
And yet, year after year, the show has come back.
There is something quietly miraculous about a piece of theatre that refuses to die. About a story that keeps insisting on being told.
I should probably admit that when we first chose
‘A Christmas Carol’, it wasn’t because I adored it. I thought it was a bit stuffy. Obvious. Boring. I wasn’t convinced it had much left to say. But somewhere along the way it worked its magic on me. The story kept opening itself up. What I once dismissed as dated began to feel unsettlingly relevant. I realised it wasn’t the story that was tired, it was my attention that needed sharpening.
This show is held together by paper, glue and sticky tape. It always has been. It is visibly handmade, slightly precarious, and constantly on the brink of falling apart. And yet, somehow, here we are, still gathering, still telling the story, still discovering that it has more to say.
A big part of that is the audience. ‘Humbug!’ doesn’t really exist without them. Each performance is shaped by the people in the room, by how they move, how they listen and respond. No two shows are ever the same. We never quite know what might happen, and that uncertainty is part of the magic.
Dickens wrote ‘A Christmas Carol’ as a ghost story with teeth. It’s sentimental, yes, but it’s also furious. It’s a story about money hoarded while people starve, about a society that shrugs its shoulders at suffering and calls it inevitable. Its moral centre is unapologetically socialist. If you have more than you need while others have nothing, something is deeply wrong.
That message still lands because the world hasn’t moved on as much as we like to pretend it has.
At its heart, this is a story about transformation. Not self-improvement in the modern, sanitised sense, but something far more radical and frightening. It’s about facing death, mourning lost love, reckoning with the harm you’ve caused, and choosing, actively, to rejoin the world. To forgive. To be generous. To belong.
Every year I’m struck by how little we’ve had to update the story for it to feel relevant. The ghosts still know exactly where to press.
People often cry at this show. They always have done. And when they leave, something inside them has shifted. Shoulders drop. Voices soften. People leave lighter than when they arrived.
I feel that most keenly when I step into the role of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Night after night, people stand beneath that figure and look up, and I can see what’s happening behind their eyes. They aren’t really looking at me. They’re thinking about time. About endings. About the lives they’re living and the ones they’re afraid of missing. There is something profoundly disarming about being confronted with death in a room full of strangers, especially at Christmas.
It is a strange thing to become death, to see the world through his eyes, and to be seen as him in return. To feel people measure themselves against silence, against inevitability. Playing that role has changed me. It has sharpened my sense of what matters, and made the small, human choices feel heavier and more precious. If the show asks the audience to reflect on how they want to live, it quietly demands the same of those of us telling the story.
Later, as everyone steps back out into the cold night, there is snow. It’s fake, of course. We all know that. And yet, for a split second, for the briefest of moments, many people believe. Hands reach out. Laughter breaks. Something loosens. That brief, collective suspension of disbelief feels like a small rebellion against a world that insists on cynicism. Theatre can’t fix everything, but in that moment, standing in the dark with snow falling all around, it reminds me how easy it still is to choose wonder.
In a world that constantly tells us to harden ourselves, ‘A Christmas Carol’ insists on the opposite. It asks us to stay porous. To feel. To let ourselves be changed by what we witness. To believe, even briefly, that another way of living might be possible.
150 performances in, I still believe that.
This show continues to resonate because the work isn’t finished yet. Not for Scrooge. Not for any of us. And certainly not for the world we’re living in.
This may be the last year we perform the show. We genuinely don’t know. We never do. When we first made it, we certainly never imagined we’d still be performing it eight years later, let alone reaching 150 performances.
This production was never designed for longevity. It wasn’t built to scale or tour. And somehow, despite all the odds, it endures.
‘Humbug!’ exists because of so many generous people. The wonderful cast and collaborators, Charlie Coldfield, Richard Feltham and Benjamin Akira Tallamy, who have brought it to life night after night.
Heartfelt thanks to Penn Bálint for the beautiful costume and poster design, and to Peter Clifford for sharing his secrets and patiently instructing us in the dark arts.
My thanks also to the staff, volunteers and trustees at Exeter Historic Buildings Trust, for taking a chance on an unknown theatre company and allowing us to run amok in this treasure of a building.
And most importantly of all, thank you to you, the audience, who have ventured out into the cold to take part in this strange, curious show year after year. My sincerest thanks to you all.
Luke Jeffery
Director
