THE SEA BROTHERS
BY GER CLANCY, JOANNA CRAWLEY & LEE WILSON
BASED ON A PADRAIC COLUM'S STORY
"THE TWO YOUTHS WHOSE FATHER WAS UNDER THE SEA"
The Sea Brothers is a project aiming to provide young audience with a highly visual, engaging, powerful show that will tackle a subject that every teenager needs to confront – accepting their parents as complex, erring, disappointingly human individuals. The Two Youths Whose Father Was under the Sea, a version of an Irish myth by a famous Irish poet and dramatist Padraic Colum, opens an amazing opportunity for such endeavour. It depicts a journey of twin brothers, Jack Sea and John Sea, who are looking for their long lost, ideal, beautiful, “princely” father, held captive under the sea by the vicious sisters, Hag of the Waves and Hag of the Hollows. Once they finally find him, after defeating the dangers on the way, he turns out to be truly divine but unapproachable and unable to live among the mortals. They come back to their loving grandfather, who always looked out for them.
Adapting the story, the writer Joanna Crawley, (authors of enthusiastically received play The Eurydice Project) will focus of the most archetypical tropes in this tale: rejection of the motherly love and confusion about the role femininity in a boy’s live (Hags), journey into self-understanding, building one’s identity outside of the safe family context, trust, loss, revenge, brotherly solidarity, struggling with the father figure.
The Sea Brothers will have a comical, picaresque style to make the show entertaining, bold and accessible.
The inspiration for the twins will be drawn from various pop-cultural depictions of “brothers on the road” – from playful, Western-inspired novel The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, through classics like The Blues Brothers to all the disturbingly witty, roguish couples in Quentin Tarantino’s and Cohen brothers’ movies.
The show will take it’s wild, rock’n’roll shape in the capable hands of Lee Samuel Wilson, one of the leading Canadian directors of young generation, experienced in creating visceral shows on various scale – from menacingly intimate East of Berlin (PAC, The Lir), to the awarded stagings of Shakespeare plays.
To make the show both visually captivating but also easy to tour, Gerard Clancy will create modular puppets, using his expertise gathers over the years of lecturing in Three Dimensional Design, Model making and Digital Art, IADT and capitalising on the experience with creating his own, enthusiastically received puppet shows: WATERWORN and Escape from the Dead Zoo.
