EWAN CAMERON picks out two fascinating music shows, fusing the Korean, and the Celtic, with the modern
Story of family Chance a fine thing in thrilling adaptation of Angela Carter novel
Fantastical: Bettrys Jones, Katy Owen and Mirabelle Gremaud in Wise Children
[Steve Tanner]
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Sunny Dancer, Tony, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and The End of Oak Street
JOHN GREEN relishes a powerful and moving drama that explores the lived realities of west London’s Punjabi community
MARTIN HALL welcomes a plea for greater compassion between believer and non-believer via the framework of philosophical enquiry
Wise Children
The Old Vic, London
ANGELA CARTER’S last novel Wise Children, a blend of magic realism and carnivalesque, sprawls across much of the 20th century as it follows the bizarre theatrical family fortunes of the Chance twins from the perspective of their 75th birthday.
Unacknowledged by their father, a renowned Shakespearean actor-manager, the twin girls are brought up on the wrong side of the tracks in a Brixton theatrical boarding house run by Grandma Chance.
Forced to make their own way, they become chorus girls before weaving a successful career through the latter years of music hall and variety theatre as a song-and-dance duo.
Similar stories
Family issues and dragon-fuelled history amount to a vacuous spectacle that ill-fits the theatre, muses SIMON PARSONS
GEORGE FOGARTY is dazzled by a breathtakingly skillful puppet version of Shakespeare’s greatest love poem
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class