Given the title, some of our followers might assume that we’ve set a new travel goal. While it is faintly enticing, we’re referring instead to our recent night at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester to see the stage edition of the Jules Verne classic.
Most of us read “Around the World in 80 Days” in elementary school, but in case you didn’t, or if you need a refresher: rich Victorian English eccentric Phileas Fogg makes a bet that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days, which he–with his manservant Passpartout–sets out to do. Of course today the world could be encircled several dozen times in 80 days, but in Fogg’s day it meant steamship and rail.
I won’t ruin the ending for you, but I’ll say Manchester’s stage production is true to the original story, though with a whole lot of great theatrics thrown in. The fun starts with the uniqueness of the Royal Exchange Theatre, a Sputnik-like construction built inside Manchester’s former stock and commodities trading building. It is a theatre-in-the-round, with three steep levels affording every seat a direct view down onto the floor. It is an intimate setting allowing the cast to interact with the audience.
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| The “Sputnik-Like” Royal Exchange Theatre |
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| The Floor of the Theatre |
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| Theatre Panorama |
The production takes jabs at itself and the theatre-in-the-round presentation in a couple of really clever ways. There are the ship props: sections of fence the cast brings out and sits next to, as if enjoying an afternoon on deck while the Arabian sea whiles away. As the actors sway back and forth invoking the rocking of the sea, other cast members sway the fence sections and tilt the tea table back and forth. In one scene the actors take the tongue-in-cheek imagination to a humorous exaggeration as they stand, rock, and sway their chairs all in one motion.
Then there are the fight scenes. When Passpartout enters the Indian temple forgetting to remove his shoes, he must fight his way past three offended natives to return to Fogg in time to catch their train across the Indian subcontinent. They throw punches from across the stage–nowhere near each other–but with coordinated movements and responses, accentuated with careful choreography, they make it work wonderfully. The fight scenes are accentuated with sound effects, often silly, and moments of slow motion highlighted by a dimmed change of lighting and crew manually manipulating items on the set–like chairs and a table being thrown into the air–to great effect.
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| Philias Fogg (L) and Passpartout (R) on their journey around the world |
There are also the creative sets, from the opening scene of Fogg in bed (he stands, with one cast member holding a pillow behind his bed and two others stretching a blanked in front of him) to their crossing the gap in the Indian railway by elephant (a gray men’s suit jacket is shaped so that one sleeve is the elephant’s trunk).
While going ’round the world in 80 days hasn’t become our new goal, it does seem appropriate that we went out of our way to see this play. We’ve had quite a few great moments so far in our travels, but this was a solid two-and-a-half hours of grinning ear-to-ear.
