Skip to main content
Work with the NEU
Mr E’s adventures in Cartoonland
SUSAN DARLINGTON applauds a play that explores the role that imagination can play for children growing up through trauma
Stefan Davis in Please Right Back [Andrew Perry]

Please Right Back
Leeds Playhouse

 

TWO people in dunce’s caps mutely hand out pencils to the audience. A voiceover explains that the story we’re about to watch could be based on real life, or it could be a work of fiction. It’s unclear how, or indeed if, the various elements relate but if you sit back and let 1927’s “dysfunctional family show” wash over you, it does begin to make sense.

Framed within the tropes of film noir, the multimedia play opens with Mr E (Stefan Davis) being instructed to hand over a briefcase to a mysterious Mr Jones. In scenes reminiscent of classic Hitchcock, the case is stolen and he must go on a special mission to retrieve it before he can return home to his family. 

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
churchill
Theatre Review / 17 August 2026
17 August 2026

EWAN CAMERON witnesses a political farce that lacks a clear message

venus and adonis
Theatre Review / 23 June 2026
23 June 2026

GEORGE FOGARTY is dazzled by a breathtakingly skillful puppet version of Shakespeare’s greatest love poem

NO LAUGHING MATTER: (L to R) LJ Parkinson as Givola, Mark Gatiss as Arturo Ui and Mawaan Rizwan as Giri in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Theatre review / 23 April 2026
23 April 2026

GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring

benjamin
Books / 6 March 2026
6 March 2026

GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son