Montblanc & Salzburg Festival Young Directors Project
1927 YDP I • The Animals and Children Took to the Streets
Guest performance
In English with German surtitles
Co-produced by:
BAC London, Malthouse Theatre Melbourne & The Showroom (University of Chichester)
End of the drama approx. 21:10.
PREMIERE
- 31 July 2013, 20:00
- 02 August 2013, 20:00
- 03 August 2013, 20:00
Print programme (PDF)
Suzanne Andrade, Stage Director and Text
Paul Barritt, Film, Animation and Design
Joanna Crowley, Production
Lillian Henley, Music
Sarah Munro, Esme Appleton, Costumes
With Suzanne Andrade, Esme Appleton and Lillian Henley
In 1927 the world was thrilled to discover the delights of talking pictures in The Jazz Singer. In a more modest way, the company 1927 hope to achieve something similar by bringing their own form of talking pictures to the theatre. Combining Suzanne Andrade’s talent for performance poetry with that of Paul Barritt for video animation, the result is an unusual and exuberant theatrical experience combining the atmosphere of both cabaret and live cinema. Different theatrical elements, genres and historical periods are superimposed upon each other in an elaborate mosaic. While the sepia tones and visual references to Russian constructivism are engagingly retro, a sharp contemporary sensibility lurks underneath.
The Animals and Children Took to the Streets is set in the Bayou, a place on the wrong side of town, where “every morning is like waking in someone else’s bad dream”. Here the animals have better table manners than some of the human inhabitants and a middle class woman called Agnes Eaves aims to save the local children through the all-healing power of art. When a popular uprising starts, this seems like the most tremendous fun but it is impossible to escape the feeling that everything is going to end badly.
David Tushingham