Theatre company YESYESNONO has established itself as a force via a series of subversive Edinburgh Fringe hits that served as de facto solo vehicles for company artistic director Sam Ward.
The Glorious French Revolution is quite the change of tack. Ward writes and directs but cedes the stage to a cast of five who perform his biggest and boldest show to date.
It’s also comfortably the worst that I’ve seen, with a stylish vigour, likeable cast and a couple of moments of genuine theatrical magic struggling to conceal how intellectually threadbare the whole enterprise feels.
Why, for starters, the French Revolution? Initially presented as a larky, rather Horrible Histories-style lesson on la Révolution française and its build up, there’s never any real sense of who the cast are supposed to *be* within the context of the show or why a group of English people are lecturing us about French history. I could guess some reasons: revolutions are fascinating, and the French one was more romantic than the Russian one and had more appealing class and religious politics than our one. But the show never says any of this. A final scene that should have an elegantly sinister theatricality to it is ruined with a clunky ‘it could happen again’ message as Ward tries to connect events in seventeenth century France to contemporary Britain without considering literally any of the intervening political movements.
There is an enjoyably sardonic lightness to its explainer-ish early stages (the Horrible Histories comparison isn’t necessarily a dig). And when la Terreur begins, the show locks into a powerfully disturbing groove, ditching the joshing for a haunting stream of consciousness account of how the seething energies stirred up by centuries of injustice finally scythed through France like a Biblical plague. Tom Foskett-Barnes’s heady electronic score is great, adding a feverish note to proceedings as events spiral out of control.
Perhaps the show’s most maddening failing is not really ever coming to grips with its own subtitle: Or: Why Sometimes It Takes a Guillotine to Get Anything Done. It essentially presents the Terror as a bad thing that came about for understandable reasons; there is no attempt to suggest that the bloodshed even achieved that much. Call me a raging commie but as a take that seems pretty mainstream, even – dare I say it – centrist.
Ward’s bet seems to be that he’s found a thrilling enough theatrical language to elevate his stage lecture into something special. And there are definitely moments where it comes close. But ultimately there is no real insight here, and no attempt to explain why this show exists or what the Revolution meant to its makers. Stylish hipster theatre, about the coolest of the big Western revolutions, but it’s about as profound as a Che Guevara t-shirt.