Wise Children

Nora and Dora, the 'famous' Chance sisters, prepare to go to their perennially absent father's 100th birthday party. With a wide and colourful, often rather crazy cast, the story veers off in a multitude of directions as Dora's reminiscent narrative slips from past to present suddenly and seamlessly throughout. The illegitimate 'bastard' Chance twins are the black sheep of the family. The all-singing, all-dancing, sweary, aging, make-up caked, high-heeled, bawdy, gritty and overall magnetic Chance twins, that is.

Never apart for long, the two are very much peas from the same pod: Sir Melchior Hazard, surviving head of a great acting dynasty, who is imminently to celebrate his 100th birthday. Packed with gags, tears, histories, mysteries, feuds and romantic (and some not-so-romantic) unions, 'Wise Children', like the Chance girls, doesn't miss a trick, and is jam-packed with all of the entrancing magic realism and nouveau-feminism that has ensconced Angela Carter so snugly in the canon of revered cult writers.