Award-winning company 1927 are bringing the follow-up to their critically drooled-over debut to Bristol Old Vic. Steve Wright takes to the streets.

“After the totally unexpected success of our first show we were given some very wise advice from a dear friend: ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water’.” Suzanne Andrade is a performance artist and director of 1927, the young London company who made such huge waves with their debut production. 2007’s ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea’, a collection of gothic and nightmarish short stories staged using a mix of live action, animation, film and music, bore a visual imprint of German Expressionist cinema, silent comedy and Russian Constructivist design – and promptly scooped up a bagful of awards.

It’s no great surprise, then, that although the company’s second show moves on in terms of scope, staging one longer tale instead of a series of vignettes, it has kept the debut’s trademark visual style. ‘The Animals and Children Took to the Streets’ is set in the squalid, ‘feared and loathed’ east-end suburbs of some nameless city. The Bayou Mansions is a sprawling, stinking tenement block, where curtain-twitchers and Peeping Toms live side by side, and the wolf is always at the door. The kids are running riot, plotting revolution and even kidnapping the City Mayor’s cat – but not for long.

The Mayor resolves to quash this juvenile rebellion fast. A sinister black ice-cream van transports the Bayou’s wayward youth to a fearsome sweet-factory-cum-prison camp, where Granny's Gumdrops (sugar-coated hard drugs) transform them into brain-dead model citizens. Then there’s the liberal Agnes Eaves, who believes that the Bayou kids can be redeemed by "love, encouragement and collage" – but will her Art Club ever take off? And what about her daughter Evie, who’s being threatened by the looming shadow nannies?

Once again mixing live music, performance and storytelling with film and animation, 1927’s twisted tale visits BOV after sell-out, acclaimed seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Perth and Paris. “A jaw-droppingly clever and gloriously subversive parable of social mobility, revolution and its suppression,” enthused The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner, “a world so complete it feels as if you've fallen down a rabbit hole.”

As it was with 1927’s debut, the look of the show is crucial. Animator Paul Barritt has used angled projection screens to create flickering cityscapes; Bayou Mansions itself is a warren of corridors and elevator shafts, its walls crawling with cartoon cockroaches. Andrade and her co-stars stare white-faced, like silent-era movie stars, from windows that open within the screens: at other times they come downstage to wander among animations, silhouettes and paper characters.

Watch an excerpt of the show on 1927’s website and you’ll find echoes of Tim Burton, Roald Dahl, Fritz Lang (1927 named themselves in honour of the year of Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ and of Hitchcock’s directorial debut, ‘The Fog’), Heath Robinson, Futurist art, German Expressionist cinema and even Buster Keaton. The show also calls to mind Bristol’s veteran film/theatre alchemists Forkbeard Fantasy. Suzanne: “We have kept all the elements of our debut show that made it so popular with audiences around the world – the live piano score, the dark humour, heightened style of acting, and most importantly the interplay between actors and animation.”

As Suzanne reveals, the first few months of trying to conceive the show – and to follow their spectacular debut – were a test of patience. “There was a lot of time spent wading around in the quagmire of bad ideas, in an attempt to take 1927 in an entirely different direction, the pressure of creating our second show weighing heavy. But when we put some work in front of an audience, things became a little clearer. They made it quite apparent that what they wanted was not an entirely different show, but a development of everything we established in our debut.

“It’s taken us a while to take our wise friend’s advice on board, but in doing so we have created a charming, creepy and otherworldly little show that feels like a graphic novel brought to life. The characters are original and sympathetic, the environment is utterly absorbing, and the animated cockroaches are truly spellbinding! Most importantly we’ve made a unique 1927 world, where anything can happen…”

THE ANIMALS AND CHILDREN TOOK TO THE STREETS WAS AT BRISTOL OLD VIC FROM 8-12 NOV. FFI: WWW.19-27.CO.UK AND WWW.BRISTOLOLDVIC.ORG.UK FOR VENUE'S REVIEW, CLICK HERE.

Copyright Steve Wright 2011