There’s a bit of fun, some broad brushstroke politics and even a moment of audience participation in this dramatisation of the French Revolution that takes us from 1789 to the 1794 Reign of Terror.
The style, with its exaggerated cartoon characters, recalls the French Revolution as depicted by the Horrible Histories. Tom Foskett-Barnes’s fast, pulsating, electronic soundscape generates tension even when little is happening.
We are briefed on events taking place by information projected onto the back wall and the commentary of a narrator who tells us there are five lessons we need to learn from this revolution The five confident actors, Joe Boylan, Paul Brendan, Sha Dessi, Jessica Enemokwu and Alice Keedwell, play multiple parts, each wearing a cardboard placard around their neck labelled with their role from peasant to king.
It opens with a shoemaker and peasants suffering from a lack of food. They need bread. An aristocrat arrives to the stage on horseback. He is off to play tennis but pauses to collect some of the small amount of food from two peasants. When one of them objects, they are dragged off by the aristocrat’s lackey.
As discontent among the population grows, a bourgeois says he wants to talk about democracy with those who rule, though it's increasingly obvious that he simply wants a bigger say for his class, and when that seems in place, he tells everyone, in the words of Labour’s leader Keir Starmer, "We are no longer a party of protest We are a party of power”.
The sympathies of this ninety-minute revolution are with the discontented. There is a good deal of Horrible Histories-style mocking of those in power. Although it holds our attention, its characters and their discontent seem very remote, even though they talk about food poverty and lack of democracy, with one final scene taking us to a contemporary party of the privileged as our cast on a darkened stage begin to build themselves a guillotine for the next revolution.
It’s a lively, energetic performance with characters vaulting over a wooden gymnastics box during the storming of the Bastille, the audience chucking white plastic balls at someone in a bouncy castle and, during a very hectic revolutionary scene, a man walks continuously on a treadmill casting his moving shadow onto the back wall as the struggle between the social classes unfold before us.
It’s an entertaining performance, but, despite depicting political events, lacks any political bite. Given the record levels of food poverty across the UK and the growing number of billionaires swanning about the country determining government policy, the play seems a missed opportunity.