Edinburgh International Festival 2024
Please Right Back
1927
Genre: Multimedia, Musical Theatre, Theatre
Venue: The Studio
Festival: Edinburgh International Festival
Low Down
Please Right Back is an incredibly creative play combining handcrafted animation, performance and original songs. It’s an impressive feat to keep such engaging and energetic performances while having to coordinate each movement to the screens. The show is bursting with creativity, showcasing an incredibly original way of telling a story, with a strong message, engaging characters, tight and meaningful performances, beautiful songs and visually arresting animation.
Review
Please Right Back is an incredibly creative play by 1927, combining handcrafted animation, performance and original songs. When Mr.E, father to Kim and Davey, disappears, letters become their only way of communication. Through these letters Mr.E tells his children fantastical versions of traumatic events, concealing the truth of his absence. This wondrous world is inspired by writer-director Suzanne Andrade’s own childhood.
The stage has three separate screens, each showing continuous hand-drawn animation with which the four stellar actors interact continuously. The animation not only presents places but also characters and props the performers act with. It’s an impressive feat to keep such engaging and energetic performances while having to coordinate each movement to the screens. These animations also vary in tone, black and white for reality and in colour for the magical tales, giving the play an interesting dynamism. The style of the play evokes 1960s Batman and the Looney Toons, especially the fantastical parts, while the performance style is quite camp and satirical. Each distinctive part has a song, differing in tone but always hitting the marks.
On the surface Please Right Back is a family story, delving into how children are affected when a parent leaves, but it is also quite critical of the treatment the British State gives working class families, satirising a Big Brother-esque controlling government. Before the play, while you are in your seat, very well behaved children in white outfits with black letters and pointy hats walk the aisles next to the seats. With a stoic pace they give pencils to the audience, doing what they are told, which sets the totalitarian criticism of the play beautifully. On this note, the play heavily explores the pull between unbound creativity and controlled demure, with the dichotomy of fantasy and reality at the core of the story, but also showing how this innate creativity in children can be nurtured or smothered.
While the animation and the performances were incredibly engaging, the story quickly becomes predictable and lacks enough surprises. In its medium length the pacing becomes staggered and the ending expected. The story has enough heart to entertain but a more nuanced take would’ve improved it. At the end the campness of the performance style also makes it hard for the more earnest message to come through, in one of the main character’s last monologue.
In spite of the storytelling hurdles, Please Right Back is bursting with creativity, showcasing an incredibly original way of telling a story, with a strong message, engaging characters, tight and meaningful performances, beautiful songs and visually arresting animation.
