Posted in: Pop Culture | Tagged: bonfire night, guy fawkes, islington, london, Remember Remember, theatre
Remember, Remember! The Fifth Of November Gets A Six Musical Makeover
Remember, Remember! The Fifth Of November Gets A Six Musical Makeover As Guy Fawkes Turns Bonfire Night Into Something Lit
Article Summary
- Remember Remember The Fifth Of November gets a camp musical remix, turning the Gunpowder Plot into a gleeful comedy romp.
- WIT? Theatre Company brings sold-out Fringe energy to London with sharp songs, fast jokes and brilliantly chaotic multi-roling.
- Guy Fawkes takes center stage, while Robert Catesby’s forgotten story adds a witty, surprisingly heartfelt twist.
- Part Six, part Operation Mincemeat, this Bonfire Night musical is irreverent, catchy and packed with queer pantomime flair.
Remember, Remember!The Musical is a gleefully inaccurate, high-camp comedy musical that takes the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and cheerfully sets fire to the history books. From WIT? Theatre Company, the show that sold out its Edinburgh Fringe run and is now at the Pleasance Theatre in London just in time for Bonfire Night, is exactly the kind of post-Six/Operation Mincemeat historical romp that thrives on anachronism, multi-roling, and the assumption that most of the audience only remembers the rhyme and the bonfire or maybe a smattering of Horrible Histories.
The four actor-writers, Lucy Buncombe, Kluane Saunders, Ross Tomlinson and Tom O’Kelly,met and bonded through the long-running topical sketch show NewsRevue at the Canal Café Theatre in Maida Vale, which I wrote for many years ago. I still get a very small residual cheque every time the US has a major school shooting, and they use my “Oh say can you see, through a telescopic lens, an American child is shooting his friends” song. Look, it was the nineties; taste hadn’t been invented then. What they deliver is absolute confidence and stage presence in a small theatre above a pub in Islington, with few effects, few lights, few props (though the pus spurting gout foot is brilliant and probably cost half the budget) and a reliance on tights, pufflington shorts, and a mass unfamiliarity with the age of the House of Stewart. Or the House of Stuart. Sorry, it changed a bit and lasted less than fifty years. That shared background in fast-paced, parody-driven comedy shows. Buncombe plays a swaggering, scene-stealing Guy Fawkes, in the fashion of Peter Serafinowicz and Ace Rimmer. Saunders, a classically trained soprano, plays the overlooked Robert Catesby. Tomlinson of Starstruck, This Is Going to Hurt, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Allelujah, is a horny, gout-ridden, thoroughly modern queer King James and O’Kelly, Stephen Sondheim Society finalist, gets to play with his Belfast accent as a Catholic terrorist, but also as the buxom, still-moustachioed diva Queen Anne and various conspirators.
The premise is simple and smart, that Catesby was the mastermind, yet posterity remembers only the more charismatic Guy Fawkes. The show runs with that injustice. Buncombe’s Guy is the bombshell everyone falls for, and Catesby ends up in far more complicated territory with King James. What works is the energy and the jokes. The songs are catchy, the lyrics full of musical-theatre and pop-culture references, from Mean Girls to Sondheim to assorted reality-TV figures, with an amazing reprise of the theme from the TV show Fame, “Remember, Remember… the fifth of… November” and the physical comedy is sharp. An opening chant in monks’ robes quickly gives way to the expected chaos of forbidden romance, double-crossing, and the kind of medical-procedure gag that lingers for the wrong reasons. Director Alex Pritchett keeps the pace high, the choreography is slick, and the production has the jumpy, “we’re all in on the joke” feel that makes Fringe musicals of this type land. Stephen Fry‘s stumbling voice as narrator adds a nice layer of false authority.
It is not subtle, and it does not pretend to be. The historical liberties are the point; the show is closer to Blackadder than Horrible Historiesby way of a queer Islington pantomime than any serious retelling. And if you are sitting in the front row, you may become one of the coinspirators yourself, Tom. But that freedom lets it hit certain notes hard, especially what the show is really about: the tragedy of being the person history forgets, in a Hamilton fashion – oh yes, and that gets a reprise in Remember, Remember as well. It’s a play that could do with extension, the end of a forced happily ever after that ignores what actually happened, in a way that Six didn’t avoid. Maybe we need to see more of the “hung, drawn and fingering”, as they put it, before going straight to the revisionist “everything is fine now”. The cast’s polish and stage experience absolutely lift it above pure Fringe chaos and suggest it has strong West End or Broadway potential if they can find another twenty or thirty minutes to hammer the point home. For what it is, an irreverent, high-energy, deliberately misinformed night out about the plot that failed to blow up Parliament, it is an absolute joy. Just don’t use it as a history revision aid and suggest that Catesby was actually having an affair with King James or that Anne of Denmark was a co-conspirator in the plot. Please don’t “Remember, Remember” that… but either way I am now adding WIT? Theatre Company to Mischief, Them There and Crybabies on my list of “see everything they ever do, ever”.
Remember, Remember!The Musical from the WIT? Theatre Company runs at Pleasance, London, Islington, running from the 4th to the 14th of November, 70 mins, tickets from £14.00
Remember, Remember! The Musical
Review by Rich Johnston
8/10
Remember, Remember! The Musical is a gleefully inaccurate, high-camp comedy musical that takes the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and cheerfully sets fire to the history books.
Actor/Writer
Lucy Buncombe
Actor/Writer
Kluane Saunders
Actor/Writer
Ross Tomlinson
Actor/Writer
Tom O’Kelly
Narrator
Stephen Fry
Director
Alex Pritchett
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