I've enjoyed previous productions directed by Emma Rice, so I was looking forward to Wise Children. Originally I was due to go last Friday, but the snow got in the way, so there was a week's delay before I saw it.
And it was a lot of fun!
It's based on a novel by Angela Carter, and is a retrospective narrative - twin sisters, Nora and Dora Chance, looking back, at the age of 75, over their lives, and the lives of their families... starting with a brief background of their father's parents,(including a cameo from their grandmother as a pregnant, youthful Hamlet) their own conception and birth, followed immediately by the death of their mother, and their own adoption by 'Grandma', the big-hearted landlady of their parents' theatrical digs..
There is then a swift, and often very funny, race through their lives, including some wonderful sequences of their time as a pair of showgirls, including their early sexual experiences.
Nora and Dora were played by three different actors,(plus a set of puppets,) at different points in their lives.
We also met their father, self-important actor-manager Ranulph Hazzard, and his entomologist, actor, explorer twin brother, Peregrine, who agrees to legally claim paternity of the twins to avoid any scandal attaching to Ranulph, who goes on to marry the Lady Atalanta, who has a set of twin daughters, (whose father, we later learn, is Peregrine, not Ranulph!) who grow up indulged and greedy.
It's melodramatic and fantastical, but it's a lot of fun, and explores family and love, and the love of theatre, without taking itself too seriously.
Well worth seeing if you get the chance. It is touring until April. (Details here)
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