Wise Children

by Angela Carter, Emma Rice

Overview

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 turbans 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…

Wise Children is adapted for the stage from Angela Carter's last novel about a theatrical family living in South London. It centres around twin chorus girls, Nora and Dora Chance, whose lives are brimming with mystery, illegitimacy and scandal.

Dora narrates the story as her older self, looking back on a tumultuous life, throughout which she and her sister have loved to sing and dance. A big, bawdy tangle of theatrical joy and heartbreak, Wise Children is a celebration of show business, family, forgiveness and hope. Expect show girls and Shakespeare, sex and scandal, music, mischief and mistaken identity – and butterflies by the thousand.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786826916
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/17/2018
Series:	Oberon Modern Plays
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Emma Rice is the Artistic Director of theatre company, Wise Children, formed in 2018. As Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe (2016/18), she directed ROMANTICS ANONYMOUS, TWELFTH NIGHT, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and THE LITTLE MATCHGIRL (and Other Happier Tales).

For the previous 20 years, she worked for Kneehigh as an actor, director and Artistic Director. Her productions for Kneehigh include: THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK, TRISTAN & YSEULT, 946: THE AMAZING STORY OF ADOLPHUS TIPS, THE WILD BRIDE, THE RED SHOES, THE WOODEN FROCK, THE BACCHAE, CYMBELINE (in association with RSC), A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (in association with National Theatre), RAPUNZEL (in association with Battersea Arts Centre), BRIEF ENCOUNTER (in association with David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers Productions), DON JOHN (in association with the RSC and Bristol Old Vic), WAH! WAH! GIRLS (in association with Sadler's Wells and Theatre Royal Stratford East for World Stages) and STEPTOE AND SON.

Other work includes: the West End production of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, OEDIPUSSY (Spymonkey); THE EMPRESS (RSC); and AN AUDIENCE WITH MEOW MEOW (Berkeley Repertory Theatre).

Editorial Reviews

Carter, a splendid British writer (The Magic Toyshop; Nights at the Circus) all too little known here, has a real winner in this giddy tale of a highly eccentric British theatrical family. Nora and Dora Chance are twin sisters, former vaudeville dancers not beyond some high-stepping sex even at age 75, living in a once rundown but newly smart area of South London. Dora tells their tale, and her narrative voice is a triumph: deeply feminine, ribald, self-deprecating (on their birth: "We came bursting out on a Monday morning, on a day of sunshine and high wind when the Zeppelins were falling''). Their mother, seduced by the legendary actor Sir Melchior Hazard, dies giving birth; the girls are brought up by the landlady, and eventually come to nurture one of Melchior's several cast-off wives. Meanwhile, his brother Peregrine, who once set off to wander the world. . . . The extravagant family comes together for a lavish 100th birthday party for British institution Sir Melchior, at which skeletons galore clatter out in full view of a national TV audience. The party is one magnificently unforgettable set-piece. The other is the filming, in Hollywood in the late '30s, of a terrible version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, by a culture-mad producer--one of the funniest and most deadly portraits of moviedom ever penned. But the whole book is comic writing of the highest order: spry, witty, earthy and oddly touching at times. It was a large success in Britain, and deserves to do as well here. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Wise Children inhabits its own manic universe and would probably translate into a spirited, bawdy musical comedy-farce of the kind in which the Chance sisters themselves performed, long ago." -- New York Times Book Review

Joyce Carol Oates

Dazzling…The culmination of Angela Carter's prolific and inventive career.
—The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Historical events and personages viewed as in a distorting mirror, and beasts of prey endangered by encounters with their chosen quarry, are representative of the charmingly deranged fiction of the late Carter (194093).

Carter's impertinent revisions of cherished conventions and beloved traditional stories do not elicit mild or neutral reactions from readers. As her friend Salman Rushdie suggests in his warm introduction to this rich collection of 42 stories (spanning the years 196293), one is either pleasurably seduced by her languorous imagery and overripe vocabulary, or made slightly ill by her intemperate romantic sensuality: you love her or you hate her. Even those attuned to Carter's perfervid imagination will have to pick and choose their way through a minefield of knotty prose and naughtier conceits, from several decidedly precious early tales through the contents of her acclaimed story volumes (such as The Bloody Chamber and Saints and Strangers) to a final three uncollected pieces that are even more hothouse-baroque than her usual work. If you can bypass the gamy contes cruels that show Carter at her worst, there's much to enjoy in her wry feminist response to the smug mandates of sexism, racism . . . come to think of it, most -isms. "The Bloody Chamber" amusingly reinvents the Bluebeard legend, featuring a virginal bride reluctant to become yet another passive victim; "The Fall River Axe Murders" examines Lizzie Borden from a sardonic female perspective; "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream" retells Shakespeare's comedy from the viewpoint of the changeling child for whom fairy rulers Oberon and Titania contend. And in the amazing "Our Lady of the Massacre," Carter employs the familiar narrative of (American) Indian captivity to create in a mere 14 pages a brilliantly compact near-novella.

A book of wonders, then, even if too cloying for some tastes—and a welcome occasion for reassessing the work of one of the most unusual writers of recent emergence.

Kirkus Reviews