PERFORMANCE: BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
PREVIEW BY AMELIA GROOM
Featuring the wonderful, whimsical and deliciously sinister fairy tales of acclaimed storyteller Suzanne Andrade, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is the debut production from the new UK performance company 1927.
‘I was working as a solo performer, doing poetry performances around London,’ Andrade says, ‘and one day Paul [animator Paul Bill Barritt] heard me doing a reading on the radio – some kind of strange story set to music – and he was into it and got in touch.
‘We swapped artwork with each other and realised we had a lot in common creatively so we started working together. We then got Lillian [Henley] as our piano player; she was a friend of my brother’s, and my old university friend Esme [Appleton] came on board when she arrived in London, as a performer.
‘We called ourselves 1927 because that was the year the first talkie film came out ‘ we’re very interested in the 1920s – the aesthetic of silent film, and also the music.’
Sweet, sinister and surreal, Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a gorgeous homage to silent cinema, incorporating fractured stories, music, poetry, dark humour, film and animation – with a Weimar cabaret twist.
‘The whole show is scored by a live piano,’ says Andrade, ‘and we’ve gone to great pains to make our films look old and grainy – we take crackle off old films and place it over ours so they all have that old crackly feel.’
While nostalgic for a bygone era, the show also embraces the possibilities of new technology, with incorporated animation throughout. The lines between what is performed and what is projected are blurred as scratchy pencil drawings morph into vintage film sequences and the performers use the rolling film as a set.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is an old saying (like ‘stuck between a rock and a hard place’), that Andrade says they came to when they had already finished most of the show.
‘Someone described some of the characters as not being able to move forward or backward, and being stuck in a limbo place. I love sayings and thought is worked as a title ‘ and then we incorporated it into the show more, coming up with some devil animations and nautical inspired themes.’
An unexpected sell-out hit and multi award-winner at the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is touring the US and Singapore before landing in Sydney, and will also make stops at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival and Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
June 17-28
The Studio at Sydney Opera House
$20-$35
Bookings: 9250 7777 or www.sydneyoperahouse.com
