Theatre review: Wise Children

After famously making her mark on the Globe with an innovative use of its budget, Emma Rice was controversially given a large Arts Council grant to launch her new company Wise Children, named after the Angela Carter novel she adapts for its first production. Dora Chance (Gareth Snook) narrates the story of her life with twin sister Nora (Etta Murfitt,) and particularly their relationship with their father, also one of a pair of twins. Their mother died in childbirth and their father, famous Shakespearean actor Melchior Hazard (Ankur Bahl,) didn’t want anything to do with them but, not wanting them to surface many years later and cause him a scandal, arranged for them to be financially supported on the proviso they kept quiet. The story he’s always been happy to imply is that they’re actually his twin brother’s children, and Peregrine (Sam Archer) does end up behaving more like a father to the girls (albeit an abusive one, in a throwaway part of the story that’s one of my main issues with the show.)

Dance review: The Red Shoes

Time for one of my very occasional dips into the world of dance - this year my mum decided she'd like to be taken to the ballet for Christmas, and when she heard that Matthew Bourne had adapted a film she remembers fondly, The Red Shoes, into a new ballet that decided it. Bourne's also looked to the cinema for his music, choosing the work of Bernard Herrmann - best known for scoring Hitchcock films, although most of the music used here predates that collaboration. In many ways the story is a natural fit for a ballet as it's about ballet: Victoria Page (Ashley Shaw) is a dancer in the Ballet Lermontov who's never really caught the attention of its conductor Boris (Sam Archer,) and so has never got further than background roles. That's until prima ballerina Irina (Michela Meazza) is injured on tour.

Theatre review: wonder.land

It's the clichés you always hear about musicals - that they're not written, they're rewritten; that every "effortless" hit has spent years in development - that come to mind during wonder.land, the National's much-maligned big winter spectacular. Perhaps going into it with low expectations helped, but it seems that under what is, undoubtedly, something of a mess, a pretty good show is struggling to get out and, given time, might well have done. As the title suggests, Moira Buffini (book and lyrics) and Damon Albarn's (music) musical takes Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland stories and transposes them to the digital age. Following her parents' breakup, Aly (Lois Chimimba) has moved to a new school where she immediately becomes a target of the resident mean girls, who bully her in real life and online.

Dance review: Lord of the Flies

Sweaty topless dancing boys made Matthew Bourne's name when he first gender-flipped the swans in Swan Lake a couple of decades ago, and he obviously knows they still don't hurt if you've got tickets to sell. An obvious source of raging testosterone, though a less obvious choice for ballet, is a novel I studied at O'level, and I'll hazard a guess so did both the people reading this: William Golding's Lord of the Flies is rarely absent from the GCSE English curriculum. If by some chance you haven't read it, or did and have blocked it from your memory, it's the story of a group of schoolboys during World War II, who survive a plane crash that kills all the adults. Trapped on a desert island they follow very proper, English rules of behaviour led by Ralph (Sam Archer.) Until, that is, the rest of the boys realise these rules no longer apply to them, and the island descends into violence and chaos.