The Great Christmas Feast review: the best seasonal event in London
With rip-off Christmas events around every corner in the capital, it’s refreshing to find a yuletide event that takes itself seriously.
The Great Christmas Feast is a theatrical event based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with a three-course meal served in intervals between the appearances of each of the ghosts. Inspired by Victorian cooking traditions, it’s a Christmas knees-up that takes itself seriously; the grown-up sibling to the ramshackle Christmas pop-ups that feel thrown together by three acting grads (fine) that come with the price tag of a night out in the West End (not so fine). Sure, The Great Christmas Feast is spenny, with tickets at over £100, but you get an incredibly high quality evening fusing theatre and food in a novel way.
You enter into a warehouse space reimagined as a Victorian restaurant-cum-dingy back alley. Go and see for yourself, it’s hard to explain, but what is clear is that this atmospheric period set transports you away from whichever Kensington backstreet we’re on. We could be in Scrooge’s workhouse, perhaps, but it doesn’t really matter.
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The show is spectacularly acted and produced, with West End actor Alex Phelps performing the roles of Scrooge and the ghosts. There are some thrilling tricks with light that underpin how this show takes itself as seriously as anything else on a stage in the capital right now.
The food, by Executive Chef Ashley Clarke of The Lost Estate, the immersive event company behind the show, is good value, and tasty, served with an imaginative cocktail list. Helpful staff suggest pairings, even if the bloke carting the cocktail trolley around – a wheelbarrow like device, God knows what Victorians were thinking when it came to their drinks cabinets – looks a bit embarrassed by the sincerity of it all.
That’s the thing, though: it is serious, and you get wrapped up in the immersion. The only problem is that it requires proper concentration to follow the story; you need to suspend your disbelief to buy into the idea that Alex Phelps plays multiple characters and it’s a bit much while you’re eating. I lost parts of the plot, but found the whole spectacle was rousing enough as a pairing to a lovely dinner.
The Great Christmas Feast runs in Kensington until 12 January and tickets are available online
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