Monthly Archives: May 2026

     FREAK ALONG WITH ANCIENT GREEKS

        The Greek gods, with their  legends , family rifts and seduction of hapless mortals,   are irresistible to all who love dramatic retellings.  It might be a heartbreaking Antigone at the National,  a sombrely tragic Oedipus wowing Broadway,  Hadestown up West or a ballet of Leda being ravished by Zeus as a swan. They’re beloved by  jokers, too: Spymonkey did Oedipussy and the Frogs with great energy.  So when a  determined band of former Plymouth students – LE NAVET BÊTE,  founded  in 2008  – had knocked about Dracula and Treasure Island (https://theatrecat.com/2025/06/13/treasure-island-new-wolsey-ipswich-touring/)  it was natural for director-writer John Nicholson of Peepolykus, their regular co-creator,   to turn to the ancient heavens. 

        For if you have a taste for determined  – and highly trained –  physical clowning and ridiculous plots,  the old gods provide a rich feast.  So here they are, starting a big tour:  Nick Bunt, Al Dunn and Matt Freeman,  between them playing over 30 roles with instant disguises , lightning quick-changes and an athletic tolerance for pratfalls, rolls, slithers and blows from a pool-noodle.   Britain needs some silliness between panto seasons,  solid basic  laughs  without reliance on the doomy overeducated whining of political satire.    There IS actually a tiny line in the programme suggesting Mr Nicholson’s dislike of Trumpian autocrats  – Zeus being king of the gods and prone to sudden thunderbolts and mood-swings, nd his wife Hera  in her sunglasses is modelled pretty closely on Meryl Streep as Anna Wintour. 

  But once the three Fates, a rock trio in black rags,  have cackled witchily about how everyone ends up dead, nonsense prevails.     The take on Zeus’ family problems is pretty broad, never missing an opportunity to do a silly voice, fall over, throw someone through the window, clap a wig and rubber lips on a fellow member or deploy the ancient time-honoured jokes  of fart or belch. The latter occurs , with magnificent soundscape, after the king of the gods has done the traditional thing and eaten up the mortal he just seduced,  lest she give birth to a child who challenges his supremacy (his own Dad Cronos did just that,  repeatedly, in the age of the Titans).  

        There is a plot:  Zeus doesn’t want his daughter Hebe to marry a mortal, Gregg the hotelier,  but her brother Ares god of war . He enlists both him and Poseidon (both in shiny budgie-smugglers and heavily armed with spear and trident) to kill Greg.    But then he changes his mind, and for complicated reasons involving walnuts tries to fake his own death, repeatedly, with little assistance from a waiter called Moussaka.  This at one point involves borrowing an audience member as a corpse: beware of the front row,  these people are good at interactions,  and though it’s not malicious you may end up in a conga. Mind you, sitting further back you may have fake droppings thrown at you by Nestor the elegantly trotting half-horse centaur (the props are excellent). 

         Anyway, Zeus  needs to go to the Underworld to save Gregg, and the second half is even more disgracefully funny than the first, and actually rather cleverer. There are classical jokes for those who know,  but you need not.  Charon the boatman of the river Styx prefers to be called Sharon , rides a big pedalo swan,  and finally resigns because his dream is to be a business strategy consultant called Steve. All within half a minute. 

          I applaud these guys: there must always be a place in British theatre for chaps who can ride a unicycle while disguised as a giant pot-plant,  and for designers like Fi Russell who decide that Cerberus, the three headed dog guarding the underworld, is best represented as a lavender pink fluffy poodle.  Who does not admire touring stage crews with the skills to manoeuvre on each few-days’ run  not only a three tier classical-cum-hotel set including a slide  but some really tight lighting and sound cues, all the kit for an underworld game of Umbrella Roulette,   and many, many  metres of inflatable hydra?  Who does not, from time to time, just need a good daft laugh in cheerful company?  We were bonding like mad in our Ipswich matinee,  and I trust that from Cornwall to the far North the same will happen.   

wolseytheatre.co.uk   to 9 may but NB,  tonight is adult-only, 18+ version 

  –   then see tour  – lenavetbete.com –   going to   Lichfield, Minack, York, Doncaster, Lowry, Salford, Poole, Hornchurch, Newcastle under Lyme and Exeter

SAD HEARTS AND SHOWBIZ

        The play begins in a pure music-hall moment:   below the stage a hammeringly jolly piano,  onto it a  capering  leg-show chorus and sparklers, ushering  in The Great Houdini.  Who is Hadley Fraser , debonair and showmanlike.  He must, of course, immediately be hung upside down by the ankles  in his vest, braces and NYPD handcuffs (the latter previously tested on an alarmed front- row lady) and swiftly wriggle out of them to wild drumbeats and applause.   

       Then we are backstage where the hero greets his own hero,  David Haig as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s a session of boxing-chat, sparring and mutual literary admiration while their wives (Claire Price and a drily comic Jenna Augen) look on resignedly.   After two acts of thrilling and revealing arguments,  director Lucy Bailey keeping the scenes changing with choreographed elegance,   the same pair will end on the same vaudevillian stage. But this time the trick will end with a moment of lonely  metaphor which  might leave you, like me,  more moved than you ever expected.   The handcuffs of mortality and grief are not so easily thrown off: some trick walls you can’t walk through.  

           Playwright-actor David Haig dealt poignantly with Kipling’s WW1 bereavement in “My Boy Jack” , and thrillingly with D-Day meteorological science in “`Pressure”.  He reads, thinks and empathises deeply with the changes,  hopes and delusions of a century ago.  So you couldn’t ask for a better sensitivity to deal, historically and emotionally,  with a peculiar 1920 moment of feuding friendship:  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle versus Harry Houdini, with spiritualism as the battlefield. 

      The creator of Sherlock Holmes had lost his son at the Somme and  been widowed. Remarrying Jean, an occult  “medium” , he plunged more deeply into his lifelong fascination with spiritualism.   With  a medical background,  he was excited by the new frontiers of science – electrical currents, molecules, radio transmission – and like many thinkers of the time he borrowed their language and mystery to feed  into a belief that the dead could speak to us through seances. There were so many dead after 1918; as he says “spiritualism brings solace to a tortured world”. 

     His friend Houdini the showman escapologist  – and the odd couple were tight friends for some years – was also mourning his Jewish-Hungarian mother. But equally he was a rigorous  sceptic: when his fame and fortune rose he poured money, research, and careful tests into debunking the hordes of opportunist mediums.  At times both men,  the celebrity British author and the lairy showman,  were on the transatlantic lecture circuit.  Houdini  would be decrying and mocking the credulous followers,   Doyle in the same cities preaching the believers’ gospel, his wife – quite darkly – warning Houdini about how many people , and his audiences,  were angry with him for his unbelief. Topical, eh?.  

      Early  in the friendship, in a chilling half-dark scene on a slow revolve,  Sir Arthur and his wife Jean host the American visitor to one of their daily séances.  The  medium   does a spectacular screaming trance,  Houdini writes in a notebook,  and late at night is found by his host having  crept downstairs to examine the light fittings and seance-table for trickery.  But the drama and humanity lies is in the way that the men try to stay friends.

         The play is elegantly, artfully gripping in its blend of sadness, anger, and personal pride (Haig beautifully evokes that blend: Fraser becomes gradually ever more stridently showmanlike).    Sir Arthur at one point is put “in touch “with his lost son Kingsley and utterly believes it, and  the  conflict  heats up when Jean Doyle plays medium and claims to  contact Houdini’s mother:  he, tight-lipped, tries for  a moment of hope but is too honest with himself.  False hope must die.  Of course it’s nonsense,   the “spirit”failed to speak Yiddish or call him by his real name, Eric.  So of course Conan Doyle accuses his friend of insulting his wife…

    There are wonderful ironies.  Houdini, who after each hysterical-emotional session just drily says “I observe trifles”,  mentions that this after all is what Sherlock Holmes does.  Whereon Sherlock’s creator strikes back with the fictional ‘tec’s famous line about how , if you eliminate every other  probability,  the impossible must be true . Conan Doyls also constantly tries to persuade the escapologist  that he really is summoning and using “a great force” of spirituality,  all magically tied up with waves and molecules,  so that’s how he does his miracles and escapes from trunks and cells and chains in the Hudson river., etc.    Houdini persistently says no he does NOT  have some weird occult force: it’s all technical trickery, practice, a lot of keys and a dislocatable shoulder.   

      This argument is given a lookingglass equivalent  after a cracking brawl when Houdini disrupts and exposes the medium Mina (Jade Williams). She just shouts insults at him as a “dirty Jew”,  but her partner-manager brings up the same argument that Doyle tried :  OK yes, sometimes there’s room for the use of trickery. But  only when the real manifestation can’t happen,  because people are getting in its way by doubting it.,,   

           Poor Conan Doyle can never accept the fakery of mediums, nor even the fact that his friend is a clever conjurer with no occult powers.  His grief won’t allow it.  When he pleadingly says “Six times I have  spoken with my son!”  Harry replies brutally “no, you haven’t!” The pain is real.  And yes, it moves the heart. 

Cft.org.uk. To 16 May

Rating 4