An archer in Lincoln green tights and pointy hat emerges on stage and is promptly sent packing. He is not, in this version, the hero. The myth of Sherwood’s folkloric outlaw really has, as the title says, been rewritten, with rip-roaring results.
Carl Grose’s story of “Hood” and his outlawed accomplices is updated with a climate message and plenty of questions around land ownership, all shot through with Pythonesque humour and the occasional sounds of steel drums. As much of a medley as that may seem, the blend is outrageous, inventive and really rather brilliant.
There are clever plays on the original story: Hood’s identity is one of this show’s surprises, the band of merry men are gender-inverted, with characters such as Little Joan (Charlotte Beaumont) and Mary Tuck (Elexi Walker). Marian is given a radical overhaul (Ellen Robertson, fabulously rakish). She is married to Sheriff Baldwyn (Alex Mugnaioni, also great) who has sidelined a king (Paul Hunter) who appears befuddled in nightshirt and socks, as if fashioned on George III.
The miller’s wife, Jenny (Nandi Bhebhe), is our sometimes singing narrator, and also a ghost after being shot by a fire arrow. Her husband (Dave Fishley) and daughter (Dumile Sibanda) have become fugitives in the forest and it is there they meet Hood. Gisburne (Ira Mandela Siobhan), a “mad monk” and the sheriff’s mad dog, is tasked with finding them – and he is a baroque comic highlight.
Directed by Melly Still, the story is given busy staging: some scenes happen simultaneously, filmic techniques are used to mute the action or draw it to a halt. It is clever but complicated, some confusion caused by occasional disjointedness along the way. But these anarchic edges fit the original, renegade spirit of the legend.
The humour is both sophisticated and fantastically silly, arch one minute and bathetic the next, managing to appeal across the board (my young nieces found it as funny as I did). Chiara Stephenson’s two-tiered circular set has a revolve along with steel and stone trees which give the mythic nature in Sherwood a counterintuitive charm.
The show feels a little too twisty and messy at times but it is utterly winning too. The entire thing froths over with a great sense of fun and heaps of imagination. This is how to rewrite a legend: a must-see this summer.
