Let’s gush, for a moment. For this really could be the best night I ever had at the theatre. The most enjoyable, the most delightful. ‘Wise Children’ at the Bristol Old Vic. Let’s rush backwards before we really go in.

My Angela Carter phase began about thirty-odd years ago. Meaning that the fuss around ‘Company of Wolves’ (I think) precipitated a period of reading and as it were, familiarisation. I’ve been on Team Carter ever since, howling along with that extravagant wolfiness, dancing with the seductive, luxuriant-but-plain otherwordliness – the prismatic fable.

She speaks for all of us who won’t behave, or take a reasonable look at things, or deny the imagination. And I love that. All her values are charged.

Carter knows that, sees that everything is a dance, a ‘story’, a place to soak up or unpick life’s sexiness. She has dumb blokes like me both skewered by her electrifying awareness, the force of her sexual politics… and yet even I feel somehow liberated, too. She became one of my goddesses – the boss, in fact, the matriarch, the guru or Senior Lecturer to them all.

I arrive in Bristol, however, strangely unburdened by anticipation. Neither foaming nor twitchy, just tired-ish and *swallows heavily* actually unaware that the family mission (booked as so often by my brilliant wife) was to see a Carter extravaganza. Yup, because if I ‘did hear anything’ I had completely forgotten that ‘Wise Children’ was Angela’s baybee!! DOH!

(In my defence, I often go to events deliberately underinformed; can be a great way of stimulating good, engaged and unencumbered watching and listening. I think probably I had, in this case, chosen to swerve any conversational build-up with this Healthy Neutrality in mind: arse that I am).

The Bristol Old Vic is a striking venue. The redeveloped gathering-hall and bars feel all of grand and intimate, cool and wonder-ful. The auditorium remains gorgeously old-school. But the play, the play…

In her programme notes, the Artistic Director speaks eloquently of Carter’s ‘wonder tales’ – of her ‘mythical truths’. In a couple of words, Emma Rice – for it is she – delivers, triumphantly on both wonder and story fronts.

The production is deliciously ablaze and dancing and singing and charming and blisteringly poignant. It’s musical in every movement, every moment. Though ostensibly we should note, a story of Common People, it positively soars and swoops and sinks and seethes (and I do mean positively) with transcending love, with issues, with comedy. This is channeling Catherine Tate as well as the redemptive power of sisterhood.

Performances are great; feels ridiculous, superfluous or  just downright wrong to single anyone out in the mercurial melody and flow. ‘Wise Children’ is built around Nora and Dora’s invincible closeness but the wonder may be springing more from the overall vision.

The word ensemble feels a tad pretentious here; this lot make a fabulous group. The playing and moving together is the making of this: chapeau, then, to both the Director (Rice) and to Etta Murfitt (Choreography) and Ian Ross (Band). Acting contributions – for example Gareth Snook’s magbloodynificent Dora – are utterly matched, supported, made possible by the whorl of song or arc of a move.

It’s enormously human: there is tremendous fun, melancholy and there is sexual abuse. There is music hall and there is hilarious shagging. There is betrayal. There is the flawed love of a ‘family’ and the cruel arrogance of a jumped-up thesp. There are ‘men’. Winged, we flit through the generations – sometimes gleefully, sometimes we find them loaded with more or less repressed trauma.

Dora: We in Brighton already?

Perhaps above all, there is a generous intelligibility to all this. It’s so beautifully entertaining without ‘going over our heads’. Wise Children is, in the finest sense, an achievement through community, through simplicity: you don’t have to be a Proper Theatre-goer to receive this. Just let the magic do its work.

Flick through the programme and it figures. The company oozes talent (I know, they all do but bear with, bear with): this posse is bursting with musicians and dancers. It’s not incidental that Patrycja Kujawska studied violin or that Mirabelle Grimaud can ‘move a bit’, as well as sing so movingly. Or that the credits include so much in the way of circus, dance, fairytale.

I’m guessing that Rice found a refuge as well as an inspiration in the ‘simple joys’ of the fable (and its ‘high priestess’, Carter) after a challenging period in her career. Thank god she did. Thank god she renewed and rebooted and gathered in again. This production really is as wonderful as anything I’ve seen. So yes…

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Wise Children is now a cause as well as a glorious production. (7% attend Private Schools, 42% of Bafta Winners in 2016 went to… you guessed it).

Rice and her team are doing their bit to a) tell stories/tell women’s stories b) oppose sexism and oppression c) demystify the arts, whilst enchanting us d) get Or’nary Kids into theatre and theatre roles.

They are training us. To experience. To be travelling players. Wow.