The baroque, fantastical fiction of Angela Carter is as much about the art of storytelling as the story itself. That also goes for Kneehigh, a company that won a wider audience after its acclaimed show Tristan and Yseult at the National Theatre last year. This adaptation of Carter’s 1984 novel by Tom Morris and Emma Rice, a co-production with Bristol Old Vic and the Lyric Hammersmith, bursts with an anarchic, tragicomic theatricality. It has Kneehigh stamped right through it.
It’s 1899. Jack Walser, a cynical journalist, wants to expose Fevvers, a fêted Cockney trapeze artist with apparently real wings, as a fraud. But he is so beguiled by her tales of a childhood in a brothel and as a prized freak that he becomes a clown to follow her as she tours Russia in a circus.
In the novel, Fevvers has the face of an angel and the body of a prize fighter. On stage, Natalia Tena is more lithe but still an earthy, sexy figure. The stage version wisely boasts a trimmer plot as well — there are no Siberian train crashes, female convict collectives or shaman-led tribes here.
Yet Fevvers remains Carter’s symbol for emerging female emancipation in an age yearning for change while people still suffer. As a melancholy Burlington Bertie figure (Adjoa Andoh), accompanied by an ever- present Stu Barker as a one- man string section and gamelan orchestra, sings: “Die, century, die. Give us the chance to let yesterday lie.”
Walser, here berated as “Viking boy” to accommodate the nationality of the athletic Icelandic actor Gísli Örn Gardarsson in the role, endures various humiliations to become Fevvers’s emotionally liberated equal. At the end the two swing in the air to Nina Simone.
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But the show is never sentimental as the comic combines with the grotesque — at times it’s like watching a Bosch painting re-created by Morecambe and Wise. Ed Woodall as Buffo, the chief clown, sings a song about beating his wife (Amanda Lawrence). As Lizzie, Fevvers’s wet nurse and dresser, Carl Grose is half panto dame, half man-hater. Lantern-like buckets and saws conjure up fearsome tigers charmed by song.
Rice’s production lures you in, just as Gardarsson is lured from the stalls and is then accosted by a camp quartet, “creatures of the theatre”, white-faced and sporting ridiculous Y-fronts. It’s this theatrical exuberance that holds you whenever the story becomes a little muddled.
The production doesn’t quite pull off that circus trick of leaving the audience begging for more, but there’s enough magic here to turn Carter’s story into its own enjoyable creature of the stage.
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