Theatre Review: Wise Children Displays The Roar Of The Greasepaint
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'Now listen carefully' says Gareth Snook as 75-year old chorus girl Dora Chance 'or it's going to be a long evening'. Even if you did listen to his synopsis of Dora and twin Nora's picaresque romp through backstage, back alleys and back passages across a lifetime of theatrical illegitimacy, incest and abandonment, it's still a long evening.
Emma Rice's newly independent theatre company is cocking a snook — literally — at her former employers Shakespeare's Globe by saying 'look what I could have done for you'.
With Vicki Mortimer's zany set of coloured lights, theatrical paraphernalia and a revolving caravan like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on life support, all the trappings of a Rice show are in attendance. However detaching them from a known Shakespeare play makes for a less satisfying outcome, partly because Angela Carter's 1991 magical realist source novel is so dense, and dark.
Top performances include Snook's sardonic vintage soubrette with the voice of Peggy Mount while Katy Owen's coarse nudist grandma channels Barbara Windsor, and Paul Hunter reworks Max Miller's scurrilous stand-up comedy. Melissa James and Omari Douglas as the younger 'Lucky Chances' do a joyous dance routine derived from Catherine Zeta Jones and Renee Zellweger in Chicago, and the stage is crowded with everything from Shakespearean actor-managers to bunraku puppets.
Busy. Dizzy. Often dazzling. But an underlying motif that early adversity makes tough surviving women ignores the fact that this isn't a universal truth.
Wise Children, Old Vic Theatre, The Cut, SE1 8NB, £12-£65, until 10 November
Last Updated 23 October 2018
