Nine Lessons and Carols review, Almeida Theatre: Mythical, moving and full of sincerity

If you’re looking for a Christmas show without any garish festivity, Nine Lessons and Carols: Stories for a Long Winter may be just the ticket. Chris Bush and Rebecca Frecknall’s devised production, which began development in late October, has real homespun, rustic spirit. “This is not a Corona play,” reads the blurb on the Almeida website, and true to its word, Bush’s text never utters either the dreaded C-word or P-word. 

It is, though, steeped in the isolation felt by so many this year – snapshots of heartache and alienation cut through with songs that pierce like firelight through darkness. It is both mythical and mortal – stories about thorns of loneliness caught in every person’s back co-exist with banana bread recipes. "I have bought up shares in loneliness,” Katie Brayben’s character states at the start. “Some of us have always been alone.”

And so, there are no carols in Nine Lessons and Carols, nor are there any discernibly didactic lessons to be learnt (“That’s the first lie,” Almeida stalwart Annie Firbank murmurs in a voiceover). Instead, self-conscious tweeness (an amusingly grating children’s choir soundtracks scene transitions) rubs up against pricklier ideas. Tom Scutt’s design invokes the feel of a candlelit chapel, shorn up at the sides with piles of firewood, a raised grey slab in the middle of the theatre swept bare, ready for six lost souls to expose their hearts on. 

And the first moments of Nine Lessons and Carols are almost unbearably moving, Maimuna Memon’s songs rising and filling the auditorium (an enormous amount of credit must go to sound designer Carolyn Downing and the Almeida’s technicians, who have managed to make that space feel so close-knit despite the two-metre distance between cast and audience members).

Bush has a striking gift for finding heart and clarity in tiny details – Luke Thallon and Elliot Levey’s scene as a father and son both struggling to care for the other is shot through with a sense of darkness that is never confronted head on, and is made all the better for it. There are scenes that are inarguably stronger than others – moments depicting an advertising team trying desperately to commodify a sense of lockdown camaraderie are fun and kinetic, if a little thin, while Thallon’s monologue about dogs and depression is a deeply affecting, determinedly unsentimental piece of writing which will indisputably be a drama-school audition staple for years to come. 

Toheeb Jimoh, too, has a crackling monologue as a delivery man “delivering MPs to their affairs”, and Naana Agyei-Ampadu’s closing moment is heart-fracturing – these are the undisputed highs of Nine Lessons and Carols, the moments that paper over its more rough-hewn edges.

Writing about an ongoing historical moment is desperately difficult – particularly to do more than simply document it, and instead burrow down into the core of the humanity underpinning it all. Part of me still cringes at references to sourdough, toilet roll shortages and support bubbles – they are such recent references, so rote and overdone. And yet, Nine Lessons is filled with a kind of awkward, searching sincerity that, ultimately, just feels remarkably human.