★★★★☆
If Emma Rice’s ill-fated couple of years running Shakespeare’s Globe in any way damaged her reputation as the most relentlessly inventive British theatre director of the 21st century, her first show running her own company puts that right in less than three hours of pulsating playacting.
Wise Children, which is also the name of Rice’s new touring company, is her adaptation of Angela Carter’s 1991 novel about twin sisters looking back on a lifetime in the theatre. It is a paean to the joys of living on the wrong side of the tracks. It is a celebration of the value of family: biological, surrogate, professional or all of the above. And with its blend of music hall and circus, of high drama and