a reflection from one of our Dramaturgs, BEN FRANCOMBE
1927: On Being Childish….
It's nearly 20 years since 1927 emerged as a unique, rough, and wayward collaboration of 20-something artistic architypes on ‘the London alternative cabaret circuit’. A lot of water has passed under the 1927 bridge since then - a lot of growing up - into a confident, efficient, ‘National Portfolio’ of mature and sophisticated, opera-directing, 40-something artistic architypes. World tours, Embassy receptions, co-commissions with European National Theatres and Opera Houses, International Television collaborations, LA-based Ozzy Osbourne commercials have all contributed to a textbook acquiescence with a comfortable understanding of critical and commercial success. 1927 are a fully-formed and grown-up theatre company.
Step inside that company, inside their day-to-day operations, however, and 1927 are strangely and gloriously trapped in a time warp of indulgent roughness, and defiant immaturity: oddly small-scale, disordered and, well, a bit childish… The very nature of the animated (cartoony?) foundations of the company’s work, the rough doodles, the lack of straight lines, the weird costumes, the prancing about, the use of silly voices, combine with a tendency to collapse and blur work time and play time, domestic space and work space, to form a culture, a style, and a product that confuses the adult world (or is it just the dramaturg?), and offers a provocative alternative to the natural order of growing up. Whether this is deliberate is sometimes hard to tell: with 1927, there isn’t too much strident assertion of creative purpose, at least not when you drop in for a cup of tea and home-made cake. Their natural way of working is a bit blurred….
Whether it is deliberate or not, it is children the company turn to, time and again, for their inspiration and narratives, and as their collaborators… sometimes as hilarious symbols of casual revolt, as in The Animals and Children took to the Streets, or as awkward adolescent ‘others’, in Golem, or as literal mouthpieces in community storytelling, as in Roots…. Or now, more pronounced, in Please right back as a backdrop, to our relentless national discourse on the demands, fears and failings of childhood development…. children leak out of the work and into their working practice: they are everywhere….
Why this interest in kids? Well, when, in 2010, the company first fired up the search engines in a pursuit of ‘research’ – or, at least, a neat rhetoric to underpin the politic of The Animals and Children – they came to a simple conclusion that Britain doesn’t like children very much. And that was a fun provocation, a little bit of disobedience: the independent theatre company equivalent of saying ‘knob’ at the back of the classroom… But, fourteen years on (and I wonder what has been happening for the last fourteen years?), such simple, cheeky, rhetoric feels tragically obsolete….
The national discourse on childhood, which has tended to give an elevated amount of credence to a particular kind of ‘reformer’, has become fearsome – a clarion call to arms – of knowing what’s in ‘the child’s best interest’: a statistically-determined urgency of negatives and fear of future; a ‘recovery plan’ to save our children from unimaginable culture-bending horrors and woke-like affectations; teachers are tigers and schools are ‘free’ - hammering out employable and disciplined children who know how – and when – to grow up. And we can’t wait for them to grow up! In Britain in 2024, it’s not true to say we dislike children, but we really dislike childhood…..
Of course, like the good society of grown-ups we are, we hide our distain behind a mantra of platitudes on achievement and ambition: talk of role models and dreaming, of aspirations, and Sutton-Trust-like Oxbridge-for-everyone possibilities – keeps the lid on this anguish, bringing us back from the brink: “you’ve got this, darling!”… But that’s just for kids with ‘normal’ mums and dads…. And by normal we are talking of those who can contribute to the economic insistencies of our broken class-bound society. The problem with our class-bound society is that we refuse to acknowledge the class-bound nature of our society: that compulsory aspiration, achievement and ambition, inherent in our received education system, is all about making everyone middle class…. And 1927’s non-scientific, disarming and anecdotal, view is that children don’t give a shit about class….
I’m no expert* (as Toby Young might say), but it seems to me that 1927 make work that looks like it’s made by children for adults, rather than work made by adults for children…. Of course it’s not: the company are a National Portfolio Organisation full of grown-ups, but there remains a sense that the company might actually listen to children once in a while – and try to make an attachment: whether it is in their durational sense of community, where time is found for play and exploration; where meals and bedtimes extend, collapse and merge into collective game-playing, where children’s voices are a constant backdrop; where ‘technique’ in performing, writing, drawing takes second place to imaginative and occasionally nonsensical content…. Where there is a sense of joy and of hope, not despondency or fear… or at least the opportunity to waste a bit of time…. Theatre has always been a bit of a waste of time – even if, today, too many brilliant administrators in theatre find themselves sucked into a continual mainstream advocacy for ‘the cultural industries’ and its contribution to the economy…. In the world of cultural ‘industry’, 1927 have always been deviants: scroungers and tricksters, crude showmen rather than artists, happy children in a world full of angry and frustrated adults….
*While I’m no expert (and Toby certainly isn’t…), there are many brilliant experts out there, asking important questions and coming to hard conclusions on subjects that too few people are caring about… 1927, salutes, defers to, and invites consideration of, these people…. Her are three recommendations to get you started:
On children and their rights, when parents are in conflict with the law, check out Dr Shona Minson’s website;
On children as transgenerational collaborators (and other interesting agendas) in performance, check out Dr Adele Senior’s new book Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance;
On children and attachment theory in mainstream education, check out the work of the Oasis ‘Nurture’ pilot project.