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›› TALKiNG PiCTURES
A ghost of Dickens past Tom Westlake talks the Great Dickens Christmas Fair and Jacob Marley by David Te mp l e ton
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hy are you wearing those chains?” A pair of small girls, visitors at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, have just spied actor Tom Westlake, who plays the part of Jacob Marley’s ghost each year at the popular annual Dickensinspired theater festival. Marley, as should be recalled by anyone who’s caught one of the dozens of movies inspired by Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—or perhaps actually read the book—will recognize Jacob Marley as the deceased partner of Ebenezer Scrooge, doomed to carry a vast chain through eternity, ever since dying, on Christmas Eve, having died a notoriously selfish businessman. “What’s that chain?” one of the girls asks Westlake. “It is the chain I forged in life,” he replies, mournfully. “What do you do with it when you sleep?” the other asks. Westlake, accustomed to getting unexpected questions, pauses a split-second before speaking the plain truth. “I don’t sleep,” he says. “I’m dead.” The next day, now divested of his ghostly raiment and back to being Tom Westlake, he laughs at the memory. “I was a bit reluctant to say that, because they were very small children,” he admits, “but that is the bottom line.” It’s the first line, actually, of A Christmas Carol. “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
The Dickens Fair (www.dickensfair.com), now in its 36th year, takes place at the Cow Palace, which is transformed into a series of streets in Victorian London at Christmas time. Milling about amongst the food and craft stalls are a small army of actors portraying various fictional characters from the works of Dickens and his contemporaries, with a few historical figures (Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Darwin, Ada Lovelace) thrown in for good measure. Westlake, a longtime participant in the Dickens Faire, has played Jacob Marley for the last five years. Originally, Westlake was cast as the understudy—in the course of a five-week-long run, even fictional characters do get sick—but then circumstances handed him the role as the primary performer. “It ended up being an understudy’s best dream come true,” he says, clearly happy to being portraying such an iconic figure. “To prepare for the role,” he says, “I did something a lot of actors don’t do. I went back to the source material. I actually read A Christmas Carol. Then I built my character based on that, but with an extrapolation taken from all of the cinematic variations.” “There have been a lot of film adaptations over the years,” I mention. “The way they portray Jacob Marley veers away from the original book quite a bit, doesn’t it?” “Yes. Yes they do,” Westlake affirms. “In the book, Marley carries an almost overwhelming sense of regret. One of his lines is, ‘I wear the chains I forged in life.’ He’s burdened down, now, with a sense of guilt for having been so mindless and thoughtless and selfish when he was alive. He was blind
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Dickens describes Marley’s ghost as: “Marley’s face ... had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobser in a dark cellar.” I guess we can kind of see the lobster resemblance ...