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
theatreCat 