Simon Callow is famous as a theatre director, screen and stage actor and author, perhaps best known to cinema audiences as the poignantly mourned Gareth in the film 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'. Callow is also quietly conducting something of an on-off, otherworldly love affair with the author Charles Dickens.

Having written about Dickens, Callow has also played the author numerous times. In Peter Ackroyd's 'The Mystery of Charles Dickens', in a 2001 mini-series about Hans Christian Andersen, in the BBC's 1996 'An Audience with Charles Dickens' and more than once in Doctor Who. One of Callow's books was his 2003 work 'Dickens' Christmas: a Victorian celebration', about the history of Christmas in England and the effect Dickens' most popular work, A Christmas Carol, had on the way Yuletide is celebrated.

Now he is to extend his relationship with Dickens by playing one of his most famous characters, Ebenezer Scrooge, in a new production of A Christmas Carol which is coming to the West End this year. Callow, already an actor of substance and easy gravitas, needs no further qualification to take on the legendary role but years studying and playing Dickens, and writing about A Christmas Carol and its influence, make him a perfect fit for playing Scrooge in London at Christmas.

The new production is directed and designed by Tom Cairns and promises to carry the audience through A Christmas Carol's many tableaux; 'from the miser's dank and creaking house in the City to riotous festivities, from cosy hearths to graveyards'.

Simon Callow with be appearing in A Christmas Carol at the London Arts Theatre from Thursday 8th December 2011 until Saturday 14th January 2012.

We have tickets available now, priced from £15 for slip seats to £37.50 for the best stalls.