Review: Around the World in 80 Days

After bringing us their spare, tragicomic fairytale of hunger, cold and abandonment (Hansel & Gretel) as our 2013 Christmas present, New International Encounter bounce back onto the Factory Theatre stage a couple of years on, in full summer and in very different style, with a highly exuberant, entertaining and action-packed ripping yarn.

At the centre of the story is Phileas Fogg, an English gentleman and creature of precise habits (“Let’s not get emotional”), who likes his tea served at exactly 64°C, is always on the dot, and has a taste for a wager: in this case, a £55,000 bet placed in his Mayfair gentleman’s club that dares him to circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days.

In an elegantly measured role by Martin Bonger (looking uncannily like a young James Stewart recast as a Victorian toff), Fogg serves as the temperate anchorman to a madcap adventure, albeit one with a faraway glint in his eye.

A cross-dressed Steffi Mueller is showstoppingly good as Bonger’s clownesque valet, the resourceful and (precariously!) moustachioed Passepartout, a laid-back Gallic flâneur who is the perfect foil to Fogg’s buttoned-up Britishness.

As a riff on the long tradition of action heroes and their stalwart sidekicks (think Don Quixote & Sancho Panza, Batman & Robin, The Lone Ranger & Tonto) the double-act of Fogg & Passepartout is well worth the ticket price alone, though the whole show delivers bang for your buck. Ben Frimston also shines as the sweaty, Brummie undercover plod, Inspector Fix, on the trail of a parallel bank heist.

The comedic (and musical) talents of the rest of the cast are well employed in set pieces – as unhelpful officials at the British Embassy passport desk, and jobsworths on the dockside – and the whole ensemble takes delight in invading the stalls whenever the action allows.

What is outstanding in this production is not so much the ‘what’ but the ‘how’. It eschews the acting out of endless physical-theatre style ‘travelling’ sequences in favour of homing in on ‘being’ somewhere, squeezing every drop of visual and verbal comedy out of each tableau with style and panache, and eliciting squeals of delight from kids and adults alike in the process.

The design is full of playful invention and imagination:  an upright piano and a brass tuba morph into an elephant ride through the jungle, while some simple wooden screens become a train carriage and a Western saloon bar under attack by ‘Native Americans’. Even the depiction of the potentially tedious hot-air balloon is handled as lightly as a feather.

Around the World in 80 Days is pure fun and entertainment, a real treat of a show for all ages – do go and see it, and take your friends and family.

Around the World in 80 Days continues at the Factory Theatre until Saturday, July 18. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/detail/around_the_world_in_80_days