BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA. To 10 January.

London.

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
by Suzanne Andrade music by Lillian Henley.

BAC (Council Chamber) To 10 January 2009.
29-30 Dec, 2-3, 5-10 Jan 7.30pm.
Runs 1hr 10min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7223 2223.
www.bac.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 December.

Black and white and deadly all over.
A sticky sweet sentimentality pervaded the heavily furnished homes of late Victorian and early 20th-century middle-class England. Countering the sweetness was an insidious cruelty, as if all that smiling, conformist decency pressed so tight on the psyche that negative energies leaked out. All this in an era when psycho-sexual investigations were beginning to explore the dirty roots beneath aspidistra-decorated, antimacassar respectability.

Nothing could seem more innocent at first than flapper double-act The Bee’s Knees, whose dance opens this show, from the aptly-named 1927 theatre company. Slightly sexy, of course. But the pair move to film, a fast-moving medium in anything like commercial form, with its devouring need for plot. So an intertitle reveals the flappers as rival secret agents. The idea of disguised identity is visualised as the two become engaged in frequent, sudden costume switches, and as their heads interchange, all owing to the magic of film. Except that when the pair return on stage they have a final, surprise change.

From here a diabolic element runs through the suite of stage and screen sections. Prominent is the story of two sweet schoolgirls whose idea of play is delighting in torment, first of their granny, then of a member of the audience selected to take the old lady’s place. These sadistic sisters ought to be teamed-up for a blind date with the carnivorous schoolboys from Julian Harries’ Haunted Commode, currently playing in Suffolk.

Stark black-and-white intensifies the mix of sinister threat lurking close under smiles and apparent pleasantness. Along with silent cinema the world of late Victorian and Edwardian slide-shows with their robustly cruel humour is also invoked in terms of modern technology, by quick-moving visuals using up a cat’s nine lives in short order and turning that most friendly of confectioneries, the Gingerbread Man, into a vengeful army.

Cold, cruel and calculated, this short evening feels substantial, given a sense of variety by Lillian Henley’s drawing-room piano accompaniment and Paul Barrit’s period-defying graphic animations. Not that you’d want to spend more time in this world, which is never more sinister than when its surface seems most sweetly naïve.

Performers: Suzanne Andrade, Esme Appleton.
Pianist: Lillian Henley.

Director: Suxanne Andrade.
Projection/Animation: Paul Barrit.
Costume: Esme Appleton.

2009-01-07 22:57:19