Review: Wise Children, Bristol Old Vic

If comedy is tragedy that happens to other people (as Angela Carter would have it), then Emma Rice’s first touring show with her eponymous new company pays tribute to this indelicate spirit. From the boards of sordid musical halls to a dank house in Brixton, by way of Shakespearean ribaldry, Wise Children is a carnivalesque and gorgeously impish show.

It’s not the first time an Angela Carter novel has been given the Emma Rice treatment: in 2006 Rice co-adapted and directed Carter’s Nights at the Circus for Kneehigh Theatre. She writes, in a tribute to Carter in the booklet that accompanies Wise Children that “Carter and I fitted like a glove”. It shows, as Rice’s adaptation complements the work, and even straightens out the looser ends of Angela Carter’s last novel.

Melissa James as Showgirl Dora in Wise Children. All pics: Steve Tanner

Dora and Nora Chance grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, at 49 Bard Road, and this is their story. It’s the twins’ birthday, which they share with their fathers Melchior and Peregrine Hazard and, as it happens, Shakespeare. These threads tie together a story of genealogy, class, identity and the world of theatre. While their ebullient personalities dazzle, from the moment they entered the world the twins were beyond help. With a dead mother and a runaway father, their story is one of illegitimate heritage, otherness and bastardised identity.

Taking place over one day, the show warps time, bends it and treats it as if the concept were as fluid as gender, or as artificial as a stage set. But the chaos is anchored by Dora’s storytelling, played with a wry smile and Cockney affability by Gareth Snook, whose pantomime familiarity means that Dora’s narration is never subsumed under the circus antics and the superbly romping score headed up by Ian Ross.

L-R: Omari Douglas, Ankur Bahl and Melissa James

Rice’s inventive staging oscillates between play and musical, but Dora and Nora order the show’s energy that veers between cabaret and skit with their rollicking narrative. From girlhood to the sordid glamour of their showgirl careers, the twins’ story is told through doubling, mirroring and artifice. Bettrys Jones and Mirabelle Gremaud in pigtails and cartwheels often share the stage with the present-day, septuagenarian Dora and Nora to create Rice’s trademark sense of playfulness.

In glitter one-pieces and short bobs, the girls’ transformation also unravels as time warps, their identity unfurling. Showgirl Dora, played by Melissa James with the reserved look of a young woman in thrall of her more provocative sister, and Showgirl Nora, played by Omari Douglas with a twirling lightness and a masterfully assured sense of the possibilities of camp, mould the Chance twins’ story into a farce of gender and identity.

Paul Hunter as Melchior Hazard

Carter wrote that Shakespeare was the “great popular entertainer of all time”, miscast as the pinnacle of high culture. In Wise Children, Emma Rice places lines from Shakespeare’s plays that undercut in her script like a Max Miller innuendo. These strict lines – between high and low culture, blood family and close friends, upper and working class – are a sham, and Rice’s Wise Children celebrates this.

Like Shakespeare, Children also exudes sex. As Dora relays Nora’s seedy sexual awakening, Carter describes the way Nora “had a passion to know about Life, all its dirty corners, and this is how she started.” In Rice’s staging, sex is a celebration, a pleasure but also a learning curve.

L-R: Bettrys Jones, Katy Owen and Mirabelle Gremaud

Young Melchior Hazard – played with pompous glee by Ankhur Bahl – abandons the twins, only for his own twin, Peregrine Hazard, to save the girls with cheques and tap shoes. Sam Archer’s young Peregrine is a muscular yet graceful force, swooping on the young twins with a sense of deranged fatalism. But he also takes advantage of young Dora sexually, and Emma Rice decides not to shy away from the incest that acts as a demonstration of how we grow to become “wise”.

L-R: Mike Shepherd, Melissa James and Omari Douglas

Every scene is tinged with comic burlesque, with Katy Owens’s Grandma Chance bringing in the most laughs with her loose, almost detached, self-aware comedy of a pantomime performance.

With its alchemical mix of anarchic identity and disordered hierarchies, Wise Children is joyous. All the world’s a stage, ain’t that right.

Wise Children continues at Bristol Old Vic until Saturday, Feb 16. For more info, visit bristololdvic.org.uk/whats-on/wise-children

Read more: Breakfast with Bristol 24/7: Emma Rice