Review of “Please Right Back” – Masterful Blend of Animation and Performance

This “twisted little story” could be fiction or not, we are told at the start of this surreal and slowly stupendous show. It leaves us wavering somewhere in-between, but then the theatre company, 1927, are masters of the in-between, having a track record of blending animation with music and live performance.

They pull off the high-wire hybridity with exquisite craft and timing. The aesthetics of a modern-day graphic novel are combined with old-style, hand-crafted moving images while lighting borrows techniques from the world of silent movies.

Four actors juggle more than 20 parts in a story of a family whose father (Stefan Davis) has disappeared. He is apparently on a madcap odyssey which he relays though letters to his teenager daughter, Kim (Chardaè Phillips), and son, Davey. The latter is a screen animation (with pre-recorded voice by Patrick Copley) who feels as magically real and characterful as his older sister.

Folded into this is the drama of their mother (Jenny Wills), trying to fend off Sally (Lara Cowin), who might be a harmless busy-body or someone altogether more sinister.

Darkness strains against childlike make-believe but what seems like whimsy or dream logic at first reveals itself to be part of a controlled story, inspired by the childhood of writer, Suzanne Andrade. It is about the role that fiction can play for children processing trauma and facing difficult experiences safely.

Directed by Andrade and Esme Appleton, reality collides with fantasy, memories are enacted before zipping forward again to the story at hand, and animated characters interact with live actors, along with delightful break-outs into song, dance, comedy and psychedelic make-believe.

The set is a triptych of screens and the animation by Paul Barritt keeps to black-and-white imagery with occasional, glorious, bursts of colour, flipping from naive joy to nightmarish.

Sometimes it looks like actors have jumped inside the pages of a graphic novel, other times as if the animation is extending itself into their world. It plays out against a backdrop of percussive, elevator-style jazz and mischievously cartoony sounds (music by Laurence Owen). It is all wonderfully tongue-in-cheek but the tension and emotion build alongside this archness.

Playing at the Edinburgh international festival before a UK tour, this one is not to be missed. Unique, moving and beautifully constructed, for kids and adults alike.

At the Edinburgh international festival, 2-11 August; then touring, 25 September until 21 December

Source: The Guardian