MUSICAL REVIEW: Remeber Remember ★★★★

History is written by the victors. Or, in Remember, Remember!, by four actors who have decided that the Gunpowder Plot would be considerably improved by queer romance, pop-culture references and a King James I who appears to have wandered in from a very different sort of period drama.

WIT? Theatre’s gleefully inaccurate musical, written and performed by Lucy Buncombe, Kluane Saunders, Ross Tomlinson and Tom O’Kelly, takes the familiar story of 1605 and subjects it to a sustained barrage of jokes, musical-theatre pastiche and knowingly appalling historical revisionism. Buncombe’s Guy Fawkes is charmingly vain; Saunders’ Robert Catesby brings magnificent revolutionary self-importance; O’Kelly ricochets through multiple characters; while Tomlinson’s King James is an irresistible exercise in camp excess.

Alex Pritchett’s direction keeps the hour moving at impressive speed, while musical director Isabella Guilar, performing live, provides the production with a nimble musical backbone. The songs are witty and often infectious, even if the score occasionally feels more like parody than a collection of numbers with lives of their own.

The result is silly, slick and thoroughly committed. It may not yet have the explosive finish its subject demands, but Remember, Remember! has plenty of fuse left to burn.