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17c review – rollicking 21st-century take on Samuel Pepys

Old Vic, London
Pepys’s celebrated diaries come under feminist scrutiny in Big Dance Theater’s postmodern mashup

What’s the British slang for penis? The woman in the wig wants to know. She’s addressing the audience. Come on now, don’t be shy. After all, we’re here to talk about Samuel Pepys and he certainly wasn’t – masturbation, constipation and defecation are all recorded in his diaries. Those chronicles of Pepys’s daily life form the basis for director Annie-B Parson’s 17c, opening the Dance Umbrella festival.

Dance Umbrella is 40 this year and on great form: still curious, still adventurous, still bringing over artists new to the UK, such as Parson’s New York troupe, Big Dance Theater. There’s less dance, more theatre in this show, as the multi-talented cast of five deliver slices of Pepys’s journal – alternately earnest, arch and sarcastic – then seamlessly mix in modern speech, video, song, and baroque-tinged dance. Especially good is the funny-boned Cynthia Hopkins (who does, in the end, learn a few new anatomical nouns), making Pepys’s thoughts sound like punchlines in a lame sitcom.

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