I was fortunate to catch the inventive evening of theatre based on Jules Verne’s Around the world in 80 Days in Oxford during the last days of its tour. I enjoyed it a lot and clearly so did the rest of the audience.
The story of the novel is retold in Brechtian style by five actors all of whom are amusing, energetic, appealing and multi-talented performers. The show was presented as a kind of small-scale circus within a visually arresting, colourful and flexible design by Sara Perks. The script managed to conflate the Jules Verne story with the real-life exploit of an American journalist named Nellie Bly. Writing at the end of the 19th century in the USA, Bly undertook to emulate the trip of Phileas Fogg. She attracted by this act the shock and dismay of many male colleagues. A woman travelling around the globe all on her own? How can she? How dare she? Impossible!
Nelly Bly won her bet, managing to go around the world in 72 days, meeting Jules Verne in France, and ending up with a triumphant progress across the USA from San Francisco to New York. She went on to write novels, marry a millionaire and become an industrialist and inventor before going bankrupt. Returning to journalism she covered the Suffragette movement, the Eastern Front in World War I and was even arrested as a British spy in Serbia.
The stories of Fogg and Bly are told with clarity through a combination of expert narration and the enacting by the cast of salient, highlight moments that include epic adventures, rides on elephants, rescues from immolation, fires, and typhoonsas well as several nefarious deeds – and we are made to imagine and enjoy every preposterous picaresque adventure. The evening is full of tumbling acrobatics of various kinds, hula hoops, tricks, music and dancing. It’s an evening full of colour, activity, humour and bizzazz.
The spectacle before us, then, is a kind of intelligent vaudeville that tells two wonderful interlinked stories, one fiction and one fact. Alex Phelps is delightful and thoroughly engaging as the withdrawn, quintessential English eccentric, Phileas Fogg; he also makes a fine Ringmaster. Genevieve Sabherwal is the perfect Aouda, rescued from the suttee pyre in India and transformed in time into the perfectly believable love match for Fogg. Wilson Benedito is the best Passepartout one could wish for; Eddie Mann is the bumbling, comical Detective Fin; and Katriona Brown makes a solid, believable, intrepid and “blue-stocking” Nellie Bly. All of them also perform as acrobats, story tellers and vaudevillians.
I thought that Juliet Foster’s adaptation brilliantly conflated the two stories that informed each other and that her direction was spot on. Movement Director Asha Jennings Grant and Fight Director Jonathan Holby obviously worked themselves and their team very hard to get the perfectly timed action; and the work of Voice Coach Yvanne Morley should also be noted for all the various accents and timbres employed by the cast.
It was a light, charming and very entertaining evening of real theatre that also drives one back to Jules Verne and in my case introduced me to the too-little-known story of Nelly Bly. My thanks to the producers – and to the Oxford Playhouse for bringing this charmer to town.