The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! (Bristol Old Vic)
It's that exclamation mark in the title which might give it away. Theatre company Peepolykus have taken Gustave Flaubert's towering 19th century realist novel about a woman stuck in a stifling marriage, and given it the comedy treatment. They gleefully, irreverently and brilliantly deconstruct one of the most tragic stories ever written, packing it full of a whole lot of laughs.
But for all the slapstick and silly costume changes, what's nice about Peepolykus' characteristically scrappy version is that it keeps Emma Bovary's story – her complicated, upsetting tale of lust, love, mental health and small-town bourgeoisie – at the piece's heart.
Everything plays out on Conor Murphy's great, versatile designs of huge blackboards covered in old chalk smudges. The cast write on the blackboard walls to lay out the scene – a hastily drawn tap which actually drips water; there's even a chalk gramophone. It's a little as if some wacky teachers were reinventing the story in a pre-digital classroom.
A (deliberately) nonsensical framing device about two rat catchers turning up to the town of Yonville kicks off the story. The entire thing is played by only four actors, who each swap parts quickly, ridiculously and surprisingly smoothly. We first meet Emma Bovary (Emma Fielding) at her most desperate, as she pleads one of the rat catchers for arsenic so she can end her life.
Then we head back in time to her beginnings as a naive young farmer's daughter who falls in love with the most exotic (and possibly first) man she comes across: Doctor Charles Bovary. Over their years married she has various lovers (shocking for the novel's original audience) who each in their own way abandon her. The only steady reliability is simple, happy, boring Charles. She is regularly torn up by guilt about not loving and betraying him so often.
The comedy and joy in The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! is all about the way Peepolykus stage it, transforming Murphy's designs easily into a glamorous party, a church, a farmhouse and much more. At one point a table even becomes a cow being milked by one of the townsfolk. Javier Marzan is very funny as all of the men Emma Bovary falls in love with. His quizzical laid-back Spanish accent provides a nice balance to the heightened frantic farce of the other actors.
There are several moments where the company step out of roles and appeal directly to the audience. These sections grate a little: they feel a little like hand-holding. Fielding keeps reminding us how Madame Bovary is a feminist text, how the piece's heroine struggles with mental health and how she is a product of the way women are treated at the time. We would have got this from the plot – there's not much need to bash us over the head with it.
Still though, the delights of this production outweigh its flaws. From a hilarious sex scene in the woods – performed twice by popular demand – to a beautiful huge gown made of a metal frame and lights which deftly and subtly also points to the cage Emma Bovary is stuck within, this is fun, frantic, poignant storytelling.
The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! runs at Bristol Old Vic until 7 May and then tours to Royal & Derngate from 10-14 May.
