Director Elin Schofield on bringing A Christmas Carol to the Crucible

Elin Schofield is an award-winning director, writer and movement director with strong roots at Sheffield Theatres. This Christmas she directs the Crucible’s festive production of A Christmas Carol, opening on Saturday 29 November and running into the new year. She talks returning “home”, the fresh new adaptation by Aisha Khan, and how Sheffield’s unique carol tradition will flow through Dickens’ classic.

Welcome back to Sheffield! How does it feel to be back at the Crucible?
Coming back to the Crucible always feels like coming home. It is a magical place with the friendliest team working both onstage and offstage to make incredible shows and experiences year-round. There is a sense of community here that I haven’t experienced anywhere else I have worked. Coming back at this time of year is the icing on the (Christmas) cake!

Your ties with Sheffield Theatres began very early in your career. How has the work you did and the productions you were involved in early on affect your work now?
I lived in Sheffield for eight years just as I was starting out as a director. The productions I worked on, as well as the work I saw at Sheffield Theatres, were pivotal in shaping my work today. My first experience was Camelot: the Shining City by James Phillips, a large-scale immersive show combining professional actors and Sheffield People’s Theatre. The company was over 150 strong! From very early on it was instilled in me that with the right support, you can work at a gigantic scale and be really ambitious in what you set out to create. Before that, I’d been working on smaller fringe shows with a limited budget, so this was a wildly different experience! After that, working with directors like Robert Hastie, Taio Lawson and Paul Foster on a range of different projects allowed me to learn about directing on the job and really role up my sleeves. There are so many elements of their directing practices that I have absorbed into my own way of working.

Aisha Khan has adapted this version for the Crucible stage. What do you hope this adaptation will bring for Sheffield audiences in 2025?
Aisha’s adaptation is gorgeous! It is faithful to the bones of the Dickens classic, but there is a freshness to it and it is really accessible for audiences of all ages. I think it shines a light on the parallels between the past and present day, despite it being written nearly 200 years ago. This version will bring bags of festive cheer, a few surprises and beautiful choral singing as we are weaving Sheffield carols throughout the well-loved story.

A Christmas Carol is so synonymous with Christmas. How does working on a classic differ from directing brand new work?
As it is a brand new adaptation, we will be treating Aisha’s text as a new piece, making sure that we approach it with fresh eyes, discovering things anew. I’m fascinated by the preconceptions that attach themselves over time to classic texts. Some of these are really useful. Some of them less so. We start by recognising our preconceived ideas about the story and then exploring whether or not those things are useful today, now, with our new version.

Speaking of new theatre, we cannot avoid the mention of two huge shows you’ve worked on recently: Dear England, igniting football passions in London and now on tour, and Sheffield’s own Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which took the steel city and the West end by storm. Are there any pearls of wisdom you’ve learnt from being part of these shows?
I am so glad that Sheffield audiences have the opportunity to see Dear England. It was a very special show to make and got a lot of people into the theatre who had never seen a play before. Equally, Standing at the Sky’s Edge was a total joy. I saw it near to 100 times whilst working on it in Sheffield and in London and I never got bored of it! What both shows gave me was an ability to focus on the detailed minutiae whilst keeping an eye on the bigger picture. There are so many moving parts involved in both productions – great training for A Christmas Carol.

“A community within this city”

With the clue in the title, there will be carols sung in the production, but these will tie in with ‘Sheffield Carols’. Can you explain what these are, how they originated, and is it a tradition that still stands today?
The Sheffield carols are an incredible folkloric tradition going back hundreds of years. People across the country used to sing carols in churches but when Queen Victoria came to power, these songs were banished from the churches. Mostly, these carols fell out of use throughout the UK, but the Sheffield residents weren’t having any of that. They moved these carols from the churches to the pubs – a great idea! There’s a community within this city who are fiercely proud of these carols and they congregate in pubs every winter to sing these songs and keep the tradition alive. People come from all over the world to experience the carols. We have incorporated them into the piece in two ways. Firstly, joyous communal singing as you’d find in a pub on a cold November or December evening, pint in hand. Secondly, our composer, Matthew Malone, has broken down the carols and reconfigured them into this wonderful choral music which will sit under the play like an aural bedrock. All of the music will be a capella – only voices without the accompaniment of other instruments. It is going to be beautiful.

Scrooge is such an iconic character with his aversion to Christmas. Is there anything you love to hate about Christmas, or are there any guilty pleasures you hate to admit you love?
I love Christmas. No Bah Humbug here. Whatever your beliefs, I think it is a lovely time to slow down, take stock and spend time with those close to us. I don’t think there is anything I love to hate about it. However, one strange tradition in our family is that on Christmas Day we go out for a curry, rather than cooking a traditional turkey roast. My grandmother decided one year that there were too many people to cater for and she booked us in at the Purple Pakora. It was a hit and we’ve been most years since.

With the production running from December through to January, do you plan to spend your Christmas in Sheffield this year, and if so, what will you be doing?
I’ll definitely be spending some time in Sheffield this Christmas. I can’t wait to experience the Sheffield Carols with the rest of the acting company. I always enjoy some wintery walks in the peaks, followed by a pub lunch, so that’s on my list. The Christmas markets never fail to get me in the festive spirit too and they’re so close to the theatre, so I’ll make a day of it and watch the show afterwards!

A Christmas Carol runs at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, from Saturday 29 November 2025 to Saturday 10 January 2026. Tickets: in person via Box Office, by phone on 0114 249 6000, or online at sheffieldtheatres.co.uk.