Remember, Remember! ★★★★★

A swish of a cloak, hats at a jaunty angle, plump pantaloons and buckled shoes are all it takes to be transported back to those shady days of James 1 – or the 6th of Scotland – and the gunpowder plot. In Remember, Remember!, a fabulous team of four, Tom O’Kelly, Kluane Saunders, Lucy Buncombe, and Ross Tomlinson riff and roll their way through an entirely improbable retelling of the events leading up to the failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament with everyone – including the King – in it.

This is a hilarious, fast-paced, highly camp and contagiously funny show with brilliant songs and catchy lyrics. The choreography is slick and seductive, and the story has been extravagantly reimagined to include a rollicking romance between one of the plotters and the king himself. To suggest that the King really puts his foot in it would be to give too much away.

Thick with witty anachronisms, referencing favourite soap opera characters, Stacey Solomon, the most recent of political events as well as a very liberal scattering of blasphemy, this is a high-energy delight of a show which had big laughs from the outset. A late arrival to the scene, in the form of Anne of Denmark, sees Tom O’Kelly sporting ‘double d’ detonators destined to explode the whole plot and the conspirators with them!

This is a fringe gem, an hour of high camp and irreverent tomfoolery.