Horrible Histories - The Vile Victorians/The Terrible Tudors

Published Friday 30 September 2005 at 10:40 by Jon Holliday

Terry Deary’s best-selling books Horrible Histories, which aim to educate young people through entertainment, simply demand to be recreated for live audiences. The Vile Victorians amply shows why.

On virtually a bare stage with a minimum of props and a screen for black projection, compere Dr Dee (Benedict Martin) in true music hall fashion introduces sketches of life in Victorian times. Among these are rude pantomime songs, night soil collectors, chimney sweep boys, ghastly slums, even ghastlier factories, children down the mines and baby-farming. All this climaxes with a far-from-flattering This Is Your Life for Queen Victoria (Zara Plessard). Timothy Speyer and Alison Fitzjohn energetically provide a whole parade of riotious characters in a broad, funny and surprisingly hard-hitting entertainment.

The second half is enlivened by Bogglevision - “ground-breaking technology, a new 3D interactive theatre system that dissolves the boundaries” - between stage and auditorium. The audience are issued with special glasses allowing them to reach out to try and touch, or shy away from, objects projected at them. The sheer novelty of this involvement adds immeasurably to youthful excitement and makes the Tay Bridge Disaster and The Charge of the Light Brigade something very special indeed.

The Vile Victorians alternates with The Terrible Tudors, the same cast of four presenting a similarly irreverent take on “the legends and lies about the torturing Tudor dynasty, why Good Queen Bess wasn’t so good, the fate of Henry VIII’s headless wives and his punch-up with the Pope”. Plus Bogglevision of course.