Choreographer Ben Duke and his company Lost Dog are on a winning streak. After unconventional takes on Paradise Lost and Romeo and Juliet, they bring us a Dickens-inspired story that’s complex but to the point, funny and full of feeling.
As in those previous works, Duke considers a classic text – and the human emotions within it – by fabricating a whole new vantage point. For A Tale of Two Cities, we arrive long after the action of the final page. Our guide is little Lucie Manette (Nina-Morgane Madelaine), who escaped from Paris in the throes of the French Revolution with her mother, also Lucie, and father Charles Darnay, and has plenty of questions about why. Now grown up, Lucie is making a documentary about her family, unpeeling secrets her parents have been withholding for years. While uncovering the story in retrospect, themes bubble to the surface: about our responsibility for the actions of our forebears and whether we can escape our pasts.
