The Wolf of Wall Street Immersive Experience, review: an overlong scenario with the barely contained testosterone of a stag party – inews

CultureArts Of all the groups you probably wouldnt want to be part of, the hyper-adrenalised, hardscrabble populace of Jordan Belfort's memoir is one

Friday, 29th November 2019, 4:44 pm

An immersive theatre adaptation of Jordan Belfort's memoir

Of all the groups you probably wouldnt want to be part of, surely the hyper-adrenalised, hardscrabble populace of The Wolf of Wall Street, the Jordan Belfort memoir made into an amphetamine rush of a film by Martin Scorsese in 2013, must rank near the very top. And yet here, against expectation, is an immersive theatre adaptation. Whats more, it is being staged just a coke-fuelled trot from Londons City equivalent of the do-or-die New York milieu from which Belfort has since emerged, post-imprisonment, as some sort of anti-heroic guru.

And if your response to the very fact of this show is, Why?, well, join the club. Whereas writer-director Alexander Wright hit paydirt with an ongoing, comparably immersive Great Gatsby, a story that allows for lots of fancy-dress shenanigans, whats the appeal of losing the celluloid filter between us and Jordan and his money-mad acolytes? Not long into the (overlong) scenario, I had a puzzling sense of dj vu until I realised that I hadnt experienced such barely contained testosterone since I found myself some years back on a flight to Prague with a stag party. (The same group was virtually comatose on the flight back.)

The Wolf of Wall Street is being staged just a coke-fuelled trot from Londons City equivalent of the do-or-die New York milieu from which Belfort has since emerged

Theres little chance of nodding off here once events indoctrinate us into the code of omert (mispronounced, by the way) at the stock-trading firm of Stratton Oakmont, where Belfort made his fortune before his fall from grace. Asked to drop to our knees (at which point, cue any number of unprintable follow-ons), we then pursue one of several different storylines, or tracks, across 27 rooms watched over by various minders in case things get a bit too, um, frisky. New York-style hot dogs are on sale to ramp up an authenticity not always evident in the wearisomely Goodfellas-esque accents.

I ended up pursuing the domestic narrative, which meant making the acquaintance of the amiable Rhiannon Harper-Raffertys Nadine, wife to Oliver Tilneys hardworking but strangely absent Jordan and mother to their seven-year-old daughter Chandler, played at the performance by the adorable, apparently unfazed Suri De Jesus: one assumes she isnt within earshot when her onstage mum is described as having a delectable vagina.

Lest proceedings be seen to be too in love with a monstrous world from which most of us would run a mile, my fellow playgoers were given a moralistic, virtue-signalling finish that may or may not find an equivalent in the other stories going on elsewhere in the building. At the end, you can grab a drink and mingle with the very lovely cast: the actors I met seemed lightyears removed from the venal environs they must inhabit seven times a week, and praise be for that. THEARTSDESK.COM

See original here:

The Wolf of Wall Street Immersive Experience, review: an overlong scenario with the barely contained testosterone of a stag party - inews