Wise Children at the Old Vic review: Emma Rice’s latest show is a celebration of all things theatre
Emma Rice has named her new theatre company after its very first production, which is ballsy, a bit like getting your partner’s name tattooed across your chest, or calling your child Susan B Successful. Had her fever dream adaptation of Angela Carter’s last novel been a resounding flop, the name Wise Children would haunt Emma Rice every time she filed an invoice or got some new wigs delivered to the theatre.
But her inaugural show at the Old Vic is a joyful love letter to all things theatre, a tangle of surreal comedy and convoluted family drama. The story of the lives of two 75-year-old twin sisters and their sprawling acting dynasty, Wise Children is a colourful variety performance that ricochets between haughty thespian monologues and bawdy end-of-the-pier standup. It’s a heady concoction of Shakespeare, jokes about hairy fannies, flashy song and dance numbers, goofy pantomime and personal tragedy.
Dora and Nora are chorus girls living on the wrong side of the Thames, who are one day invited to Chelsea to celebrate their suspected father Melchior’s 100th birthday. Their memories take the audience back in time two generations – with the pair’s younger selves played by several sets of gender-swapped actors – as an ensemble of estranged and illegitimate relatives, some enjoying varying degrees of theatrical success, contort themselves into all kinds of comic scandals. It’s a raucous show and plays out at a head-spinning pace, becoming heartfelt and sweetly sincere as it goes on.
There could hardly be a more appropriate work for Rice to make flagbearer of her new company. Her brief stewardship of the Globe ended in acrimony, her unconventional artistic vision and a push towards accessibility clashing with the old theatre’s staunchly traditional outlook. Carter’s novel is about the two kinds of culture we have – high- and low-brow – and this bawdy adaptation frequently thumbs its nose at the industry’s gatekeeping high-horses, in their ivory horse-towers. As much a dig at theatre’s esoteric stuffiness as it a celebration of the stage, Wise Children feels like a mission statement.