FringeReview UK 2024

The Children’s Inquiry

LUNG

Genre: Adaptation, Children's Theatre, Community Theatre, Contemporary, Family, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Musical Theatre, New Writing, Political, Theatre, Verbatim Theatre

Venue: Southwark Playhouse, Elephant

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

The Children’s Inquiry starts with Samuel Pepys and ends with Keir Starmer. So who’s responsible for the plight of children abandoned over centuries to the streets, the workhouse, abusive fostering and state eugenics?

Change, as a voice-over less than a week old reminds us, is always happening and always the same. Writers Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead capture it with an all-children cast of ten, in a verbatim musical composed by Owen Crouch (also sound designer) and Clementine Douglas.

Musically directed at Southwark Theatre’s Elephant Playhouse by Philippa Mogg who co-conducts and Kate Marlais, who writes additional material, it plays till August 3^rd.

Verbatim material is crafted to a hypnotically riveting libretto by Monks and Woodhead, key phrases litanically repeated as chants, refrains and lyric hooks. Even more credit must go to composers Crouch and Douglas, who lift those phrases into memorable torch-songs, with additional material by Marlais.

Story-telling’s mostly clear. A scorching indictment through 360 years also traverses 360 degrees of experience in ‘care’, focusing on key moments longer than others, mostly 20^th century: Word War Two, Dennis a murdered evacuee, 1950s Australian ‘resettlement’, the 1980s Protect and Survive farrago along with homophobia and Clause 28. Then 2007 Baby P and care homes; more recently a lorry migrant and Covid.

Studded with Big Ben chimes announcing prime ministers alongside other grandees’ voiceovers, it alternates live performances with those same actors miming voices of authority and surveillance with side-splitting mimicry. Credit too to Crouch’s sound design of 26 voiceover artists augmented with authentic broadcast clips.

But mostly the work zones in on four perennial witnesses, latterly real children emerging from care, backed with statements from the late 1930s onwards. Credited as creatives in the production, four lead witnesses are given a century to tell their, and other, stories: Jelicia, Frank, Angelica, Amber.

20 thrilling performers alternate in two blocs. With six ensemble and a lead cast of four, this performance featured Jelicia (Eva Philipps) Frank (Noah Walton), Angelica (Lineo Nomonde), Amber (Chizaram Ochuba-Okafor), with Antonia Tom-Dollar, Jude Farrant, Jersey Blu Georgia, Vinicio Korch, Kai Parillon,  Mia Raggio. They’re superbly-blocked and disciplined, sing with power and punch.

It’s a speed-history lesson in child neglect rather than concentrating on abuse, though Rochdale’s touched on. What we’re given is often harrowing examples of child neglect, brutality, systemic rejection.

Singing verbatim makes powerful verse out of lines like “the bombs are coming”, which recurring out of their 1940s context, return to chilling effect. And even such flat ones “If things don’t change, they’ll stay just the same” gain power in context and repetition. Others like “My dreams will never change” inflected by the four, takes on fresh tinctures and bitter irony.

Though the text signposts events clearly, some mostly early quotes (like Pepys) are lost; because person and date are not referenced. That’s in contrast to later narrative where it’s clear. There’s a reason to include these, so losing their point seems a pity. Ironically it’s this speed-centuries’ moment that needs most clarity.

There might have been lit-up dates, but clearly this production favours a portable simplicity. Lulu Tam’s spartan set consists of chairs (as it did in Bindweed, this week at the Arcola) alternating with brightly-coloured, monogrammed tops all suggesting ironic neglect. Unlike Bindweed, Tam hasn’t gone for an aleatory flourish (chairs stuck together in a horseshoe above, like previous incumbents) but let the sheer expressivity of choreographer Alexandra Sarmiento have actors pile chairs up and then at one moment, knock them down flat. Economy of means, maximum expression.

Will Monks’ lighting uses dark to haunting effect particularly in the farcical ‘Protect And Survive’ moment where performers illuminate their own faces with torches.

Philipps as Jelica is an extremely fine singer and often leads out the four, taking other roles too. Walton’s Frank comes into his own in the 1950s, haplessly abandoned; Walton matches this with quiet eloquence elsewhere. Nomonde and Ochuba-Okafor as Angelica and Amber often blaze as a double-act, younger than the other two (the youngest actor is just nine).

Tom-Dollar’s moment as child-murder Amelia Dyer around 1914 is painfully good, and apart from other roles she gives witness in the final piece ‘Come the Revolution’ in a tale of neglect in contemporary Britain. Farrant in that same tableau as Christine impresses, and  earlier in a piece ‘Aeroplanes and Gliders’ flinches Australian experience.

Blu Georgia as Dawn in the same dark piece also blazes out and as a death-targeted Health Worker; and earlier as Evelina judging Dyer. Most memorably she’s Heather Sharples coming out as gay in 1981 just when Farrant apes Thatcher and Pope John Paul II mouths off about abomination.

Korch’s 1953 Australian émigré moment is the most detailed, and later as Darren Coyne cast adrift in 1969 London he cuts a striking figure, as does Farrant as Ian Thomas in the same tableau. Parillin takes small parts but his great moment – and it’s a long one – comes as Phoenix. Who fights his way into contemporary UK, gains status and wonders whether it’s worth it in ‘You May Not Survive’.

Raggio too shines as Laura Beveridge passed around as ‘300 people turned up’, singing out in quatrains of neglect and parcelling. As Hannah Shead in 2000 (‘It’s Never Too Late’) it’s a dial-up of the same shunting. Finally Raggio is quietly blistering as Sharon Shoesmith (‘We Missed It’) Director of the ill-fated Haringay council (Baby P is stigmatised as blond and blue-eyed, hence the Sun’s interest).

2017’s Committee was a verbatim play at the Donmar of the government-dropped Kids Company, and Camila Batmanghelidjh is similarly vindicated here in Blu Georgia’s performance.

Ensemble work makes this riveting, along with punchy music, shimmied by the cast  with wit and in-your-face aplomb, and mostly crystalline lyrics from plain speech and distilled trauma. Though it can’t have the impact of one story, say Helen Edmundson’s Coram Boy (recently revived at Chichester) it’s a supremely unvarnished document, telescoping centuries of wrong, and sings it outright. Worth two-and-a-half hours of anyone’s time.

Published July 12, 2024July 12, 2024 by Simon Jenner