We’re a long way from Annie. The Children’s Inquiry is a questing musical about kids in care – there are no moppet antics or life-changing benefactors. Instead, the pioneering theatre company Lung pursue the changing British care system over 150 years, exposing the heartbreakingly arbitrary way in which children’s fates can be sealed. It’s drenched in disappointment yet somehow hangs on to hope.
Four young people shared their stories with writers Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead. Threading through the piece, they remind you that children in care can be living other people’s bad choices; that a crisis can spin your life off course; that you can ache for the family that let you down. All four are incredibly resilient – but must they be, just to navigate childhood?
These children are thrillingly seen and heard in the musical’s public inquiry into a faltering system. Big Ben’s chimes punctuate the evening – the sound of a state playing catch up, often retrospectively. Cruelty scuttles beneath official scrutiny: Victorian baby farming, a murdered evacuee, Baby P.
Composers Owen Crouch and Clementine Douglas unroll anthem after soulful anthem – poppy beats matched with hard-knock lyrics. Weary youth workers commit to the bop; children maintain a doo-wop sashay, even when shipped off to abuse in 1950s Australia. Voices soar over sorrow; everyone gives their best clap and shimmy, despite everything.
The stage picture is constantly mobile in Woodhead’s production, choreographed by Alexzandra Sarmiento – the will for change is in every fibre. Sneakers scamper over the herringbone floor, young actors sing with their whole chests. There are two casts: on press night, Fayth Ifil unleashed a rip-roaring set of pipes, Hari Aggarwal made a beadily affronted Thatcher, and Fearn l’Anson gave devastatingly sardonic lip-sync.
The struggle to shape a system is a long grind, and Monks and Woodhead get stuck in their structure: cataclysmic event, self-congratulatory parliamentary response, heartfelt anthem about the actual impact on children. And repeat, and repeat, all the way through section 28 and austerity, through Theresa May and Keir Starmer’s call for change. Yet for much of the time, this is an exhilarating piece of political theatre: engaged, sophisticated, insistent.
• At Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London, until 3 August
