![]() ![]() Its colours are of the Senyera, the yellow and red Catalan flag, and this vibrancy of colour follows through into the costumes. Designer Sara Perks’ multi-level fairground circus set allows three-dimensional movement. So, we end up with two plays-within-the-play, the journeys of fictional Fogg and factual Bly.Ī circus big-top creates both the setting and the ambiance of the show. ![]() Bly accomplished the journey during the winter of 1889-90, alone and with only a Gladstone bag, meeting Verne himself en-route, and astounded everyone who thought it could “only be done by a man”. The acrobat rebels at this, and she proposes setting up an alternative narrative, that of Nellie Bly, a real-life American journalist, who pressured a New York newspaper into attempting to replicate for real Phineas Fogg’s fictional eighty-day journey. Parts are found for the clown, the knife thrower, the trick rider and the ringmaster himself, whereas the acrobat gets “all the other bits”. The concept of a high-energy spoof on Around the World in 80 Days has been tried before, but Forster, in her adaptation, has taken it several steps further on.Ī circus ringmaster breaks the fourth wall to engage the audience with setting up the casting of a play based on the Jules Verne story. The inventive directorial force and dynamic cast leave even the audience exhausted. This take on Around the World in 80 Days packs stacks of theatrical genres too, circus, spoof, pantomime, thriller, farce, travelogue and definitely physical theatre. And stacks are packed into its eighty days as they are reduced to a couple of mad-cap hours. Appropriately for a tale about a race against time, here is a production that cannot stand still. ![]() “This play is about the joy of movement … in every sense”, says Juliet Forster, the director of Tilted Wig’s high-energy version of Verne’s 1872 classic adventure story. ![]()
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