THE ANIMALS AND CHILDREN TOOK TO THE STREETS
BAC, London SW11
Opened 9 December, 2010
*****
One of the joys of 2007’s Edinburgh Fringe was a show entitled Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea.
Likened to “Shockheaded Peter
done by posh girls”, it was a collection of gleefully dark cautionary
tales performed by a trio of white-faced young women (one of them on
piano) against excellently executed mock-Expressionist animations. The
delight was not just in the show itself, but in the discovery of a
company – named 1927 – who promised further and greater pleasures in
the future.
Their follow-up show has taken a while, but it bears out all the
predictions and anticipations beautifully. The Animals And Children Took To The
Streets both preserves and builds on the company’s stylistic
foundations: once again Suzanne Andrade writes and directs; she, Esme
Appleton and musician/composer Lillian Henley perform, and Paul Bill
Barritt provides wonderful animation and film backgrounds, this time
Constructivist- as well as Expressionist-influenced. I say
“backgrounds”, but they are integral to the action: they provide the
tenement wall through a window of which Andrade peers, the supporting
cast of unruly “pirate” children and even one of the principal
characters.
Rather than a series of sketches, this is a more unified whole,
portraying life in a seedy corner of an unnamed big city, in Bayou
Mansions in Red Herring Street, a place not unlike poet John Cooper
Clarke’s Beazley Street, where “the rats have all got rickets/ They
spit through broken teeth.” Cockroaches and lizards crawl over
Barritt’s projected walls as Andrade narrates and plays a junk-shop
owner and fence whose daughter (Appleton) heads the delinquent and
revolutionary Pirate gang. When the city authorities embark on an
extreme programme of pacification, one of the children kidnapped is the
(animated) younger sister of Agnes (Appleton again), whose rescue is
attempted by the Bayou’s caretaker (Andrade again) in the hope of
winning Agnes’ love. Does he succeed? Sometimes: the audience is given
an option of “Realist” or “Idealist” endings. (The night I saw it, the
house was defiantly bah-humbug in its choice.) Henley provides
supporting performances and piano accompaniment which ranges from
silent-movie-type vamping to deliriously black songs in which Andrade’s
lyrics rhyme, for instance, “kitchen sink” with “Maeterlinck”. This is
a perfect alternative Christmas show. In fact, it is a perfect
alternative show. In fact, it is a perfect show.