Multi-award-winning director Emma Rice brings her unique, exuberantly impish vision to Angela Carter’s great last novel in this brand-new theatre production. A big, bawdy tangle of theatrical joy and heartbreak, Wise Children is a celebration of show business, family, forgiveness and hope, with a generous dash of Shakespeare, scandal and mischief, taking the audience on a rollercoaster ride of emotion.
In Brixton, Nora and Dora Chance - twin chorus girls born and bred south of the river – are celebrating their 75th birthday. Over the river in Chelsea, their father - and greatest actor of his generation - Melchior Hazard turns 100 on the same day. As does his twin brother Peregrine. If, in fact, he’s still alive. And if, in truth, Melchior is their real father after all...
Performed by a talented ensemble cast, this entertaining, all-singing and dancing show opened to a raft of 4 and 5-star reviews at London’s Old Vic in 2018. Adapted and directed by Emma Rice, the former Artistic Director of Kneehigh and Shakespeare’s Globe, it was filmed for the cinema screen at York Theatre Royal.
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"Fantastic. Life-enhancing, brilliantly uninhibited, all-singing and dancing... Stars? I’m not sure why you would stop at five." ★★★★★ The Observer
"It's pure, unadulterated theatre with an airtight company, subject, direction, and production. Rice not only blind-casts the whole piece, but single-handedly gives a masterclass on how to play with gender." ★★★★★ Broadway World
"Rice honours perfectly the dark enchantments of Carter’s imagination with this carnival-esque tribute to theatre as a substitute family." ★★★★ Metro