The Animals and Children Took To The Streets (Plymouth)

Multi award-winning company 1927 has taken its time to follow up the memorable Between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea, but it's worth the wait.

Director Suzanne Andrade's quirky The Animals and Children Took To The Streets is a caustically comic, Tim Burton-esque nightmarish fantasy, with overtones of Dickens, silent movies and vaudeville.

A somewhat lightweight story is beautifully told by three quick-changing, white-faced actors (Sue Appleby, Lewis Barfoot and Eleanor Buchan), ingenious animation, a lively piano accompaniment by Lillian Henley and deadpan voiceover.

Seemingly set in the 1920s but with trial bikes, satellite dishes and videos, Andrade captures the zeitgeist of a city on the brink of riots and revolution. And takes the opportunity to dryly comment on the irony of unhelpful helplines, jobsworth employees, ridiculous rules and discounted prices.

In Red Herring Street – where one can buy anything from second-hand dildos to pan-fried road kill – there is the cockroach-infected slum Bayou Mansions, home to perverts, racists, animal-nappers and other dregs of society. All patiently observed and cleaned up after by a sardonic caretaker ticking off the days to his big £777.77 escape.

As the feral kids run riot and Zelda, not content with being the daughter of a drunk and petty thief, rouses her pirates to revolt, Agnes Eaves moves in to selflessly tame the rampaging, roiling children with PVA glue, lentils and pasta bows.

But the mayor has other ideas: not content to have tidied up the park by replacing crying addicts with water features and removing, mysteriously overnight and without trace, bench-dwelling drunks, he turns his attention to the Bayou's vile offspring with a campaign involving Granny's gumdrops, the chemical cosh, black ice-cream vans and looming shadow nannies.

Animator and designer Paul Barritt is undoubtedly the star of the show, populating the three sided set with stylised arty (with a capital R, we are told) collage and flickering sepia film portraying the crumbling tenement, Red Herring Street and more. With superb detail, the cockroaches wriggle, lifts descend with live cargo, dust rises, rubbish chutes digest their malodorous contents and police raid the somewhat dodgy junkshop while actors and image combine with exquisitely impeccable timing.

Wonderfully off-the-wall and a very entertaining 70 minutes.

– Karen Bussell