REVIEW: Wise Children - The Storyhouse, Chester.

‘It is a Wise Child that knows its own father, but wiser yet, the father who knows his own child.’

It’s 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, and in Brixton, Nora and Dora Chance – twin ex-chorus girls from the wrong side of the tracks – are celebrating their 75th birthday; meanwhile, in upmarket Chelsea, the father who has always refused to acknowledge them and the greatest actor of his generation, is turning 100.

Angela Carter’s fantastical, picaresque, last great novel from 1991, Wise Children, is re-animated for the stage by Emma Rice’s electric, bawdy and impious production. This is Rice’s first production with her new theatre company (also Wise Children) and it’s easy to see why The Globe’s management decided that her staging methods as Artistic Director were too modern & radical, as every inch of the tiny Storyhouse stage is packed to the lighting rig with colour, music, movement, butterflies and even a revolving caravan. (The sensory overload clearly proved too much for the theatre itself at one crucial dramatic point, with a shortage/lights out & a wheelchair bound actor looking dangerously close to being accidentally shunted off the stage by an electrically wired, moving caravan).

This story of a seedy theatrical dynasty, of illegitimacy, abandoned children and of families found, encompasses both high and low culture – and it sparkles. This is Rice’s love letter to Shakespeare & the play is steeped in Shakespearean allusion & explicit reference – with an emphasis on Lear. Our families may reject us (much as Rice’s bosses did her) but we can choose another, happier, if more unconventional family – in Rice’s case her own production company & in the ‘Lucky Chances’ case the deserted, the dispossessed and the vulnerable. Women can not only survive patriarchy but find salvation and self-fulfilment through their mother-child-sister-granny bonds; as Nora says, ‘we’re both of us mothers and both of us fathers’.

Not only is Rice’s production gender-fluid but also takes liberties with race and age via a dazzling cornucopia of choice roles, including Omari Douglas as a transformed teen showgirl, muscular and sleek, shimmying salaciously in scarlet heels; Paul Hunter’s ‘Gorgeous George’, an end-of-the-peer smut-merchant, a splice of Max Miller & Frankie Howard, from an age where innuendo was king and whose pathetic demise is only briefly and accidentally glimpsed - and is all the more heart-breaking for it, and Katy Owen’s Grandma - a cackling, hard-drinking matriarch who is basically a randy rip-off of Catherine Tate’s Nan.

In Gareth Snook’s Widow Twankey-esque older Dora, the storyteller & arch, camp chorus, Rice makes a virtue out of a necessity; to pack almost a century of episodic novel into a crackling stage production takes a linking device and Snook’s warm, winning and philosophical commentary almost succeeds in disguising the prose source material.

Whereas King Lear ends tragically, Rice’s version is ultimately kind to her audience, so even sudden moments of shock and disbelief are softened by the use of sentimental songs: ‘My Heart Belongs To Daddy’ never sounded so plaintive.

It’s hard to find a moment of rest in such a subversive, riotous and life-enhancing show. Two hours race merrily along, bursting with verbal, visual and musical delights, leavening the darker themes. It’s definitely Carter’s baby - and she would’ve loved it.

Reviewer - Tracy Ryan
on - 19/3/19