The Studio
Five stars
Life’s great adventure starts early for Kim after her dad disappears from the family home they share with Kim’s mum and her oddly wise kid brother Davey. As outlined in the letters he sends her, her dad is now Mr E, on a mission to get a briefcase to the elusive Mr Jones, and must embark on dangerous train rides, tame wild animals at the circus and so much more as he completes his mission to get home in time for tea. Except, the reality isn’t really like that at all, and when Kim finds out the truth she falls in with a bad crowd just as outside forces are wanting to tear her family apart.
The tone is set for the 1927 company’s latest fusion of live action, animation, music and storytelling by two figures in number covered dunce hats handing out pencils to the audience. What follows moves from spy thriller pastiche to contemporary urban fable, all delivered with a fantastical sense of magic at the show’s heart.
With co-directors Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton’s cast of four moving through Paul Barritt’s ingenious animations, in terms of plot, Mr E’s fanciful leaps are as fast moving as those in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. This is set to an aesthetic drawn from 1970s public information films and British TV teatime cartoons. With Laurence Owen’s playful music adding to the production’s light and shade, performers Lara Cowin, Chardae Phillips, Jenny Wills and Stefan Davis relish every moment in vintage style.
All of this combines to transcend Andrade’s text from a personal meditation on the roots of her own creative life, to accidental liberation by way of the power of the imagination. While highlighting the inherent social inequality at play in fractured families, it demonstrates the importance of stories in an exhilarating theatrical fantasia which, in terms of its own power, is very much mission accomplished.
The Herald, August 7th 2024
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