Ex-Globe boss Rice returns with racy, joyful oddity
TWO years on from being squeezed out of her role running Shakespeare’s Globe, Emma Rice returns with a new company, Wise Children.
That’s also the name of the bawdy and ebullient show with which she launches it: an adaptation of Angela Carter’s 1991 novel, a tangled family saga about the friction between highbrow art and culture’s grubbier, grittier forms.
Aptly, it’s a story of ageing and rebirth, steeped in Shakespeare and canny about the problems of his status as a national treasure. It delights in the idea of doubleness and division — twins and mirror images, communities broken in half, the north and south of London — as well as in the skew-whiff and the off-kilter, whether it’s cross-dressing or the crossed wires of comic misadventure. The narrator is wisecracking Dora Chance, who reminisces about her life on the stage. She and her twin sister Nora are apparently the illegitimate offspring of Melchior Hazard, a Shakespearean actor who behaves as if he’s royalty. The Chances, based in Brixton, have a turbulent career in song-anddance, whereas the Hazards — including poisonous twins Saskia and Imogen — live in Chelsea and favour classical drama.
Theatreland is the story’s hero, and it comes across as a messily convivial place, full of greasepaint and emotion, antiquated jokes and giddy musical numbers (the songs are by Ian Ross). It’s all sold with a rich sense of the surreal — by Gareth Snook as the 75-year-old Dora, Katy Owen as the twins’ pottymouthed granny, Paul Hunter as both Melchior and punning comedian Gorgeous George, and Omari Douglas and Melissa James, who are electrifying as the Chances in their showgirl heyday.
Not everything works. Sometimes the theatrical in-jokes come too thick and fast, and the final scenes drag — notably
⬤ during an awkward visit to Brixton’s Electric Avenue. But Rice does justice to the verve and racy humour of Carter’s writing, and the result is a pleasing oddity, tinged with melancholy yet joyous and inventive.