“Please Right Back”, Edinburgh International Festival
Annie Loui at the Studio, Edinburgh
12 August 2024
The project is a co-production between the Burgtheater Vienna and the company 1927 who are respected for their inventive combination of animation and live performance. Their fantasy world set and well-judged costumes for The Magic Flute (seen at the festival in 2015) combined with inventive projection that enhanced the fantasy aspect of the opera plot and conveyed it in a wildly entertaining format.
Please Right Back follows a similar template, with an ambitious integration of live and animated performers, animated objects, and animated backdrops. An animated pot is stirred on an animated stove by a live cook with a real spoon! The whole thing works.
This is an art form of its own, a one-off genre. Kudos to the attentive actors who conjure up reality through their absolute belief and careful technical attention in order to spot marks in their projected set and scene partners. Frenetic developments see us immersed in a film-noir-inspired story of Mr E who careers across the globe in search of the villain who stole his mysterious briefcase. This is repeated many times in the story. The frantic Mr E writes to his children from an undisclosed location. He shares details of the pursuit and new obstacles that prevent him from achieving his mission to “hand a perfectly innocent briefcase to a man called Jones and get back in time for tea – easy-peasy.”
Despite the fine acting of the small cast, who play multiple stereotypical film noir characters in numerous entertaining costume changes as well as occasionally breaking into song, I intuit that the whole production leaves the audience feeling slightly dulled.
Audience members experience the story through the eyes of Kim and Davey, the children of Mr E. We are following their imaginative journey as they visualize the world of their father as relayed by his letters. When we finally understand where the father has gone, and that the “friend” who comes to visit mom is actually a social worker, we are saddened by the reveal.
There is a social justice moral but we only understand this element at the end of the performance and it feels too late to engage us more deeply. We enter the world and it entertains us. Despite marvelling at the technical virtuosity on display, we come away with little sense of dramatic resolution. I admire 1927 as a company, largely for their frenzied creativity (unapologetic stylization methods are key) but their work seems to best reverberate in classical pieces where plot and structure are already in place so providing a rubric.
