The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

Overview

The Bayou Mansions are like a council flat in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 'hood — rambling, sepia-toned, variously European and darkly whimsical. The inhabitants of the Bayou are the depraved and forgotten of a prosperous city, and their children run amok. Beyond average juvenile delinquency, Zelda and her gang, the Pirates, plot Marxist revolution. Meanwhile, sweet, bourgeois Agnes Eaves and her daughter, Evie Eaves, move in to extend the youths the civilising influence of craft class; the gloomy custodian is one pay cheque away from escape, although the residents around him insist those "born in the Bayou die in the Bayou, too"; and outside the tenement, the city enters a moral panic about the "child problem", which eventually presents a bitingly contemporary solution.

This is the premiere run of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets from British company 1927 (Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea). What draws them sell-out crowds and widespread acclaim is their mix of animation, performance, spoken word and cabaret that is genuinely multimedia in approach and fun and accessible in execution. The City of Lost Children seems the obvious reference point, but Tim Burton, Dave McKean, Shaun Tan, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, naive art, vaudeville and Soviet typography have all left their mark on these rich visual stylings.

Performers Suzanne Andrade (also writer/director) and Esme Appleton (also costume designer) interact with a world created by Paul Barritt's animations, which allow them to yell out of high windows, fall through space, get rained on, ride cats and, in perhaps the most poetically realised image, lie asleep in their beds while walking in dreams. The wry soliloquies are snipped short of monologue by music hall ditties (written and performed by Lillian Henley) so catchy you'll want them recorded.

There's something we just know to be magical about interacting with animation right there on stage, which is why it doesn't matter what I say in this last sentence; you've already stopped reading to go book your tickets, and that's as it should be.