THE ANIMATOR

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★

“The little-known story is astounding and has a propulsive energy all its own.”

The rough-and-ready, make-do-and-mend, why-not-try-this approach of the early animation pioneers is both the style and subject of Akimbo Theatre’s rambunctious retelling of the Lotte Reiniger story.

And it is quite a story. Lotte, played with bags of undaunted pluck by Lexie Baker, has a dream of turning her delicate silhouettes into the first full-length animated feature. We are in Germany in the early 1920s. Walt Disney is still years away from Sleeping Beauty.

But Lotte will not be dissuaded, despite the prevailing sexual politics of the time – and the rise of Nazism.

Her first encounter with her eventual collaborators is straight out of The Big Bang Theory: cloistered nerds, obsessing over their art, unaccustomed to – and not happy about – this brilliant bright girl in their midst, small scissors round her neck ready to cut a silhouette of exquisite delicacy at the drop of a hat.

But they succumb to her enthusiasm, vision and craft, and soon they embark on a four-year project to create The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a full-length epic compiled one frame at a time, a project that would push the boundaries of the possible. Along the way, Lotte invents the multiplane camera – providing depth – long before Disney popularised the concept.

The five-strong troupe – Baker, Owen Bleach, Halvor Tangen Schultz, Flo Wiedenbach and Richard Durning – devise and perform the piece under Rosanna Mallinson’s robust direction. They hurl themselves into the febrile world of interwar Berlin: violence, Schnapps, love, chaos, debauchery and storyboards.

The ensemble throw everything at the piece – dance, slapstick, caricature, screeching. Some of it works, some of it drags when the frayed edges become more of the piece than the piece itself. The cabaret scene, for one, is a seemingly endless indulgence we could do without. We hanker to return to the studio, where the artists’ work is cleverly projected on a screen, giving beguiling glimpses of what the fuss was all about.

The second half takes a more sinister turn as the Nazi censor sees degeneracy in the fairy tale. He tries both to seduce the filmmaker to the Nazi cause and to drive her there through blackmail. These scenes should have a long-lens-of-history feel, but they are horribly present and uncomfortably familiar.

This hotchpotch of styles, carnivals and cavorting sometimes tests our patience, but the performers are never less than committed and joyous. The little-known story is astounding and has a propulsive energy all its own.

Like giddy schoolchildren at the end of a sugar-rush day, the cast settles down before the big screen. Everyone falls quiet, everyone sits still, everyone stares up, open mouthed. In a moving and enchanting moment of wonder and connection, we see a prince sail across the storm-tossed Arabian seas once more.

Breathtaking.

THE ANIMATOR

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 21st August 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Luisa De la Concha Montes

Recent reviews from this venue:

BRIXTON CALLING | ★★★★ | July 2025

THE WHITE CHIP | ★★★★ | July 2025

WHO IS CLAUDE CAHUN? | ★★ | June 2025

THIS IS MY FAMILY | ★★½ | May 2025

THE FROGS | ★★★ | May 2025

RADIANT BOY | ★★½ | May 2025

THE ANIMATOR

★★★

“a charming snapshot of a unique point in history wherein the concept of ‘connection’ was redefined”

A verbatim play based on the true story of a lone phone booth situated in the middle of the Mojave Desert in 1990s North America, Citizen Band Radio’s play Mojave follows Godfrey ‘Doc’ Daniels on his journey to discover this strange landmark. The play opens on the phone box in question covered in a white sheet, against which a stylised desert is projected. These projections, combined with the live DJ-ed music, do well at plunging us into the action from the very start of the piece and continue to do so throughout. The setting of the nineties is important and rightly emphasised through radio interviews, music excerpts and a particularly commendable audio-visual presentation to show the evolution of a website at a time when the internet started to come into its own.

A disadvantage that can arise with verbatim theatre is in the structuring of the play – life doesn’t tend to conform to a standard three-act format after all – and there are certainly moments where Mojave feels a little too still, plotwise. The story starts strong with a focus on Doc. A fantastically choreographed movement piece reveals the monotony of his daily life and the way in which his obsession with the phone booth leaks into it. As it continues, however, the choreography starts to feel more like padding put in to lengthen the running time. The second half of the play consists largely of a montage of different calls to and from the booth and, though at first interesting, sloppy transitions combined with a stagnant plot line steadily work to undo the immersion that the first half of the play has done so well to create.

In spite of this, the ensemble works well at multi-roling a whole host of different characters. They switch smoothly, even when shifting between accents (Scottish, French, German, American) at speed. The dialogue, lifted from transcripts of Doc’s recordings and phone calls made to and from the booth, lend an interesting and unusual form of realism to the play; not realism in the harsh or brutalistic sense, but something softer and more comfortable to observe. The cast reliably hit their comedic beats and the moments of awkward interaction between strangers on a phone line are especially well executed. It is with this relaxed and humourous tone that the play manages to offer a charming snapshot of a unique point in history wherein the concept of ‘connection’ was redefined.

Reviewed by Katy Owen

Photography courtesy Citizens Band Radio

Tag Archives: Jonathan Ben-Shaul

THE ANIMATOR

★★★

Southwark Playhouse Borough

THE ANIMATOR

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★

“The little-known story is astounding and has a propulsive energy all its own.”