Bonkers but brilliant, a very British Rice pudding
Wise Children (Old Vic) Verdict: Tumbling with ideas
DIRECTOR Emma Rice, freed from the suffocating old bores at Shakespeare’s Globe who sacked her as artistic director, explodes with ideas in her new company’s debut production.
Wise Children adapts an Angela Carter novel (it is also the name Miss Rice has given to her new troupe). The production is a bit mad. There are so many inventive touches, you almost wish it was reined in by 25 per cent.
Yet that is the appeal of an Emma Rice show: the whole thing is so dolloped with theatrical bombast, so suffused with warmth, it finally melts you into submission.
The story is about septuagenarian twins in Eighties London. Dora and Nora Chance are one-time showgirls with a complicated family story.
Their father is a great Shakespearean actor who long ago disowned them. The shallow plot device is that the sisters have been invited — today! — to his 100th birthday.
Various Rice trademarks are evident: berets, butterflies on rods, a stage band, a yokel freshness and a company of mainly youthful, lithe actors who multi-task and mime and sing and cavort.
To the rear of the stage is a retro caravan used for various purposes: as an ice cream van, a house, a theatre dressing room and more. Its flank becomes a screen for an animated film which, alas, conked out on press night.
That did not really matter, but I was sorry it happened because the animation, describing a trip across London, was beautifully done, after the school of Raymond Briggs.
Gareth Snook and Etta Murfitt get the comedy off to a slow, Monty Python-ish start as the adult sisters. Some of the language is needlessly coarse: despite the title, this is not a play for children.
THINGS pick up when the story reaches back to the sisters’ Victorian ancestry, told with broad, cartoonish humour.
There is little point going on about the plot because it is so tangled, but the unmatchable Paul Hunter does one of his music-hall showman turns and Katy Owen, who with her dated quirkiness embodies the Rice style, is ace as the girls’ occasionally naturist grandma. Her nude suit is a cheery wonder of flapping giblets.
Glamour is introduced with Melissa James as Dora in her heyday. Opposite her is Omari Douglas’s drag Nora, legs like a giraffe. A gymnastic singer called Mirabella Gremaud weighs in with songs delivered in a bewitchingly echoey voice.
As the story leaps from Brighton to Brixton and beyond, the whimsiness threatens to run out of hand, but it is finally brought under control with an ending marinated in positive vibes.
When other directors try this sort of thing, it often feels fey and forced. When Emma Rice does it, it feels madly British and, for all the otherworldliness, rooted.