Trafalgar Studios,London
Bristol OId Vic’s bewitching musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s LHomme qui rit makes a witty West finish transferVictor Hugo was one of the great myth-makers of 19th-century Europe – a royalist turned republican whose novels captured, and perhaps also helped to form, and a deeply romantic sense of historical injustice. L’Homme qui rit,published in his late 60s near the finish of a 15-year exile from France, returns to one of Hugo’s great themes – a misshapen man whose deformity shows up the society in which he lives. While the hunchback of Notre Dame was born crippled, and Grinpayne (as he is named here) is the victim of a political assault,the bottom half of his face sliced off by an unknown assailant.
It’s a fabulously theatrical conceit, and The Grinning Man gets its latest incarnation in a transfer from Bristol weak Vic bursting with a rude energy that belies the sophistication of its theatrical referencing. We meet Grinpayne first as a puppet child who watches his mother drown in a shipwreck after being torn from her side by superstitious sailors (so far, or so Shakespearean).
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Source: guardian.co.uk