Image: Photo of Suzanne Andrade

1927 are in a world of their own. The multi-award winning company specialises in combining performance and live music with animation and film to create magical filmic theatre described by the Telegraph as ‘dark and fruity, wildly inventive, fiendishly skilled and with a great sense of joy and purity’. Their show Roots, a medley of rarely told folk tales set to a live score involving Peruvian prayer boxes, donkey jaws, violins and musical saws, was shown internationally before having its run curtailed by the pandemic. Founding member and artistic director Suzanne Andrade talks to Run Riot ahead of the show’s re-staging at the iconic Wilton’s Music Hall about inspiration, hibernation and curating other people’s stories…

Eli Goldstone: Roots is a medley of stories found in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index - could you tell us about the book and how you discovered it?
Suzanne Andrade: Through Marina Warner, a hugely inspirational writer and quite the expert on folk tales. I borrowed a book from my stepdad, Once Upon A Time by Marina Warner, and devoured it cover to cover. Marina spoke of the Aarne index in the book and I thought I’d pay the British library a visit. I wasn’t disappointed. I keep meaning to put the ‘borrowed’ book back on my stepdad’s shelf…
 
Eli: Roots was adapted for radio, has it been through many different iterations since the idea was first conceived?
Suzanne: It has. It began in our 1927 studio, candles on the table, huge pots of Irish stew, snowing outside. We asked our mates and kids to read a story each and drank too much Aldi wine. At one point Alwyn the 8 year old threw one of the stories on the candle to see it burn. The evening ended with a sing song round the piano. Some stories have also been performed in a workshop in a Chilean prison. These tales tend to tell you how and where they want to be told.
 

Image: 1927

Eli: How did you and 1927 co-founder Paul Barritt meet and what was your creative connection?
Suzanne: Via Radio 3 funnily enough. I was reading these weird stories on Mixing It which was a brilliant Radio 3 experimental music programme. Paul heard me and got in touch. He wanted to buy my CD but as I had ripped off other people’s music and ruined it with my weird tales I couldn’t possibly charge him any cold hard cash. We swapped my CD for an envelope of his pictures. Rough Trade got in touch after that Radio 3 appearance too and asked if I had a label yet. I told them I hadn’t actually written any of the music, just stolen other peoples. They said I should get in touch when I had ‘authored my work’ a little more. And here I am nicking folk tales and tarting them up.
 
Eli: Give us a little peek into the collaborative journey of a 1927 show - how do ideas normally start to take shape?
Suzanne: Hard to say, one of us will just throw an idea up, something that has got us thinking, if everyone else’s eyes light up, we pursue it. Lots of writing and research happens then, followed by drawings and music, some experiments, and it sort of carries on like that for a long time getting more honed as we go.
 
Eli: Did you continue to make work during the pandemic and what did that work look like?
Suzanne: We did. We made 1927’s Decameron Nights – an adaptation of Roots for Radio 3. We turned some folk tales we’d created with a group of inmates in Chile into animations with primary school children and our mailing list, some young animators and some musicians. We became more collaborative in some ways. We also ran a letter writing project with kids and teachers, made a ‘we miss you’ video with said teachers for the kids who were off school, and got much more involved locally. We all live in Margate and London, so we created projects that could work in both places.


Image: 1927
 
Eli: What’s the most surprising element of a 1927 production?
Suzanne: I think it’s seeing images like these in theatre. Seeing animation and weird pictures onstage. Also the interplay between the live and the animated. The effect is surprising and quite dreamlike too, it’s a bit uncanny and often gives people weird dreams…
 
Eli: You have done stand up in the past, do you find that humour still plays an important part in your work?
Suzanne: Humour is a part of every 1927 show. Roots is a very funny show, though some of the stories have such an odd sense of humour – We have found in travelling the globe that humour goes a long way in reaching out to different audiences.

Eli: Wiltons is a magical venue. Now that theatres are back up and running where else have you been most excited to revisit?
Suzanne: The Tom Thumb in Margate is a favourite of 1927, it’s a great intimate venue and they have a brilliant cocktail bar too. Plus five minutes and you can be in the sea. If Southern Water hasn’t filled it with poo that is…
 
Eli: Finally, what's your favourite folk tale?
Suzanne: Hans my Hedgehog as told by John Hurt in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. It is very creepy and very old and I watched it when I was very young on the telly… It had a seminal influence. We didn’t put it in the show as we could not improve on it, though we have written an extended version of it set in Port Talbot and featuring a brass band. Think Brassed Off meets… a creepy hedgehog man.

19-27.co.uk

1927 present
Roots
5-30 October 2021
Wilton's Music Hall
Graces Alley
London E1 8JB

More info and tickets: wiltons.org.uk
 

Image: 1927