A new show, Please Right Back, from 1927 opens at Southbank Centre from 21 Dec-5 Jan 2025.
Ticket link: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/1927-please-right-back/
“Combining handcrafted animation and bold storytelling, Please Right Back sweeps audiences into a magical, mischievous world, inspired by a true story.
1927’s poignant coming-of-age tale is a unique and mind-blowing world of pure inventiveness. Part social realism, part science fiction, with a healthy dose of mischief and a dash of dystopia, come and see this manifesto for the power of the imagination.”
Below, you can find an edited extract from a syndicated interview with Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt, is co-founders and co-Artistic Directors of 1927. 1927’s trade-mark style integrates performance, music, and animation to create groundbreaking theatre and performance.
Can you give us a brief overview of your creative journey as a company leading up to the point of making this show?
Suzanne: We started off working in art galleries, backrooms of pubs, performance, poetry, gigs, Glastonbury festival, and creating little vignettes, little short pieces.
We didn’t necessarily think we were going to end up working in theatre, actually, but we were very much working in a live context with animation, live action, music performance. That was nearly 20 years ago now.
Then we put together some scratch performances at Battersea Arts Centre, then Paul and I took a show to the Edinburgh Festival in 2006.
One day, no one came! It really gave us this binding spirit of, ‘Right, we’re going to come back next year, and we’re going to really try and do this’.
The following year, they all sold out, and we had people from all over the world coming in and subsequently booking the show.
The next thing we know we’re in Sri Lanka and New York and Washington and New Zealand and South Korea.
It was really, really surreal, going from South Carolina to South Korea, touring for years.
It was definitely giddy, and then we were commissioned to make our second show by the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne which has its World Premiere at Sydney Opera House, and that did really well.
When we were making that show, we got invited to make our first opera, which was Mozart’s The Magic Flute in collaboration with an opera company in Berlin.
And that’s still on – with 4 productions running in Berlin, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf and Warsaw and a new production in Seattle next year!
Paul: It takes us so long to make shows, so we’re not pumping them out every six months, it’s more like every few years.
The Animals and Children Took To The Streets was the first time we used a narrative for a whole show. The Magic Flute was an expansion of what we do, and a key show, and it really opened up the world for us, working in opera houses. Then we made Golem, which ran in the West End.
Suzanne: We started writing Please Right Back during lockdown, and then it opened in Vienna with a German ensemble. Halfway through the show, we went to LA to direct an Ozzy Osbourne music video!
Paul: Yes, we’ve made a version of this show once already, and now we’ve translated back into English, and we’ve remade and rejigged quite a lot of elements of it. It’s exciting that it’s finally going to be hitting a UK audience.
Suzanne: It feels like it’s almost a trilogy with The Animals and Children Took To The Streets and Golem. Please Right Back feels like the third of this kind of show. It’s a partner piece to those other shows.
Tell us a bit about the story of Please Right Back?
Suzanne: The criminal justice system was up there as something to write about, and the education system is something we constantly return to.
The show deals directly with children and the imagination. It’s very loosely based on letters written by my dad from prison when I was growing up. I said to Paul this might be a springboard, a relationship between a parent in prison and his children.
The letters were quite imaginative that my dad wrote, as if he was having a great time in prison. He was trying to make this very adult, very unpalatable experience more palatable and playful for his children.
We thought, maybe they’re our protagonists – a dad, who’s in prison, and a daughter, a little girl, and her brother. We started there.
We have ended up looking at statistics around the criminal justice system and how little support there is for families and communities, and we started looking at some of these statistics around intergenerational crime.
We thought, what if these statistics got into the wrong hands, what might people do with that? And then the growing academisation of education in this country, this return to an almost Victorian discipline; this strictness, and this obsession with Maths over the humanities; this push back against progressive education, all started to weave its way in.
We’ve got this idea of discipline, and children and the imagination, the education system, the criminal justice system, and it’s all spliced in there in a kind of psychedelic dysfunctional family show!
Paul: Ultimately, I think the show is more about education than about the justice system as such, more about the children of intergenerational crime – that’s really the core political thing that it’s about.
But it’s also about the power of the imagination and how exactly like Suzanne says, the imagination can be used to help make things easier and better, and why not tell crazy stories?
It’s about a father being away from his kids at the end of the day. They don’t want to be apart and have been pushed apart, and it’s about that really.
1927: Please Right Back plays at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room for its London Premiere from 21 Dec – 5 Jan. Tickets from £16.00. Southbankcentre.co.uk