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Mat Jones performs A Christmas Carol and The Wind in the Willows from the authors' original texts. There is a word in A Christmas Carol that nobody uses any more. Scrooge, waking on Christmas morning in a state of giddy redemption, calls out to a boy in the street and sends him to buy the prize turkey. The boy, understandably suspicious of this sudden transformation in a man famous for his meanness, responds with a single word. Walk-ER! It means, roughly, "I don’t believe you

Let me be clear from the start. I have nothing against a spectacular Christmas. The glitter, the big productions, the songs you cannot get out of your head until February. If that is your Christmas, enjoy every moment of it. But I'll admit, quietly, that it is not really mine. I think a lot of people feel the same way without quite saying so. That what they actually want from December is something simpler. Real connection with other people. Stories told honestly. Experiences

There is a particular kind of English summer afternoon that Kenneth Grahame seems to have invented. Warm, unhurried, spent on or near a river, in the company of good friends with nowhere especially important to b e. Reading The Wind in the Willows for the first time as an adult, I found myself wondering how a book written in 1908 could feel quite so much like a memory. The Wind in the Willows gets its first outdoor performance at the briefly reopened Dell in Hitchin in 2021.

With such a multitude of ways to deliver a ghost story, I've chosen to take a subtle approach, but there's not just me. Not by a long long way! This November, Paramount Pictures releases Ebenezer : A Christmas Carol, a major Hollywood adaptation of A Christmas Carol directed by Ti West and starring Johnny Depp. From what we have seen so far it promises to be a darker, wilder take on the story, which is entirely in keeping with a director known for pushing genres into unexpe

Mat Jones reflects on twelve years of performing A Christmas Carol, from a candlelit church in North Herts to stages across the UK.