Review: Wise Children, Wise Children/The Old Vic, York Theatre Royal, until March 16. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
IMAGINE a Victorian vaudeville troupe or a circus travelling across Europe picking up performers, musicians, speciality acts, en route.
It would look not unlike Emma Rice's new Wise Children company, set up since she left the artistic directorship of Shakespeare's Globe and more in keeping with her 20 years leading Cornish company Kneehigh.
Do not take it the wrong way when I say Wise Children are a modern-day freak show, not in the overt manner of the Circus of Horrors, but in how Rice celebrates, liberates and embraces beauty in all forms: a message for this age of Brexit intolerance for "outsiders" and fashion magazine photo-shopped "perfection".
Vicki Mortimer's design echoes circus in its lighting, while the set is dominated by a caravan, again recalling travelling troupes in Rice's adaptation of Angela Carter's last novel: a "celebration of showbusiness, family, forgiveness and hope" that receives a big, bold, bouncy, exuberant, darkly imaginative, saucy interpretation.
Opening on the 75th birthday of The Lucky Chances, Brixton showgirl twins Nora and Dora Chance, Rice's hyper-production jumps around in time to tell their life story. On the way she employs puppetry glorious live music, theatrical in-jokes, old Bob Monkhouse and Max Miller gags, Shakespeare quotes, much mischief making, scabrous scandal and mistaken identities; men playing women, women playing men, and multiple versions of the same character at different ages. Fabulous show, fabulous performers, fabulous butterflies too. Charles Hutchinson
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