Reviews

The Animals & Children Took to the Streets

13 December 2010

It could be easy to tag 1927’s The Animals and Children Took to the Streets as style over substance; it is none too shabby on the eye and the story, though sweet, feels in parts quite light. But timing is everything and on a day of epic student protest, the story of angry children taking to the streets to fight against an unfair social system, seems instead eerily prescient.

  We follow pretty Agnes Eves into the dark dank world of Red Herring Street. This dodgy neighbourhood, full of vice and melancholic caretakers (who rather brilliantly speak only in sardonic voice over) is brought to wriggling life by Paul Barritt’s mischievous film and animation. A sparkling and robust score, performed with both gusto and grace by Lillian Henley, underpins Barritt’s constantly shifting world. It is a landscape littered with intelligent style references to 1930s Bauhaus poster design whilst revelling in naught cartoonish comedy.

  Performers Suzanne Andrade, Esme Appleton and Henley, firmly inhabit this two dimensional environment, making it flesh and blood with some calculated yet joyously specific clowning and mime. Perhaps most brilliantly whilst 1927 knowingly laugh at their own theatrical trickery, in Andrade’s sharp and fruity script there is also a sense of reality to their world and characters; a truth which engenders empathy.

  Even in the face of a narrative which may not stand the test of time, The Animals and Children took to the Streets is and always will be an entrancing piece of art with a capital R (or so they tell us). 1927 have once again conjured up a night of unique theatrical magic out of a potent combination of deadpan grotesquery and vaudevillian flair. This is cautionary tale, on the surface at least, is a macabre masterpiece of invention and skill.

– Honour Bayes