The Animals And Children Took To The Streets
Put together German expressionist film, Weimar Cabaret, Russian constructivist art, pre-Disney animation and the cartoons of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey and you have what could be the recipe for an indulgent piece of Gothic art. However, The Animals And Children Took To The Street is a witty, spiky, richly entertaining and impressive hour and half of theatre filled with great performances, technical brilliance and joyfully tongue in cheek script from the members of the 1927 Theatre Company.
A combination of projected animated backgrounds, beautifully realised by Paul Barritt, with quick and clever changes of scenery and costumes allow the company to bring their twisted tale of underclass uprising and feral nippers vividly to life. The performances by Suzanne Andrade, Esme Appleton and Lillian Henley, each taking on multiple personalities, were cartoony, in the best sense, fitting seamlessly into this paint and ink environment and providing real 3D effects.
It’s rare in theatre that a show, particularly one containing as many moving parts as this, works so completely but here all the elements that needed to harmonise did and came together to create an entertaining, enthralling and visually stunning whole.
Bewildering, baffling, confusing, pick your adjective, all of them could be used to describe the night’s second offering The Colour of Pomegranates Sergei Parajanov‘s 1968 film on the life of the Armenian poet Aruthin Sayadin known as the King of Song. The audience can’t say they weren’t told that this was not going to be a biopic, rather it would be a series of tableaux representing the poet’s inner life. But even armed with this information I suspect their minds were slightly unraveled by the 79mins that followed.
The film dripped with symbolism some of which, particularly the representations of sex and death, was simple almost to point of banality but the remainder, for an audience without a knowledge of the poet’s work or Armenian history, culture and religion was as inscrutable and open to interpretation as any untitled work of abstract impressionism.
Impenetrable though the film may have been the imagery was frequently stunning. Splashes of colour denoting emotion and scenes that looked like still lives or medieval landscapes appearing every few minutes meant that the film had a power to stay with you even if it didn’t quite reach you on every level.
Probably the best way to experience The Colour Of Pomegranates is precisely that, experience it. Go in with no preconceptions or forewarning and let its imagery wash over you without analysis or too much thought or, and this is the conundrum with this film, perhaps not.
Check out the rest of the Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival @ The Traverse Theatre