Islands: Tale of The Unknown Island / The King of Capri (2005)
The King of Capri by Jeannette Winterson, illustrated by Jane Ray
performed outdoors with brightly coloured soft puppets and objects tossed back and forth across the stage by a ragtag clown troupe. Based as closely as possible on the illustrations by Jane Ray.
A king who lives on an island where he has everything he wants. Across the water is another island where the people have to work to make do. One day a wind blows all of the king’s clothing and food and furniture over to the other island. In his dressing gown, he crosses the water for the first time ever, to see if he can find help.
Tale of The Unknown Island a parable by Jose Saramago (translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa).
Told indoors in and amongst the audience. The scale changed progressively from miniature to lifesize, until the space ultimately became the boat with the audience in it. Shadows and ethereal-sounding music lent a dreamlike, timeless quality to the telling.
A man goes to the king to ask for a boat. The king, accustomed to requests that he can say No to, has never met with such a request. To rid himself of the plaintiff, he grants permission to use an old boat down in the harbour that is falling apart from disuse. With one stumbling block after another the man almost despairs in his search for an Unknown Island…. but discovers that the wind has been behind him all along.
Poster Design by: Molly March
Two stories about islands transmitted through puppet theatre, with words directly from the books with generous permission from the authors. Set in and around the workshop/barn at Curly Willow Farm, Grindrod, 2005
Authors: Jeanette Winterson, Jose Saramago
Director: Varrick Grimes
Designer: Cathy Stubington
Original Music (Tale of the Unknown Island): Joelysa Pankanaea
Instigators: Cathy Stubington and Lois Anderson
Puppets and props: Cathy Stubington with Uschi Eder
Lighting: Stephan Bircher
Cast: Lois Anderson and Tom Jones, with Jonathan Teague as storyteller.
Musicians: Murray Macdonald, Joelysa Pankanaea
Additional Cast (King of Capri) : Jaci Metivier, Leif Saba, Nell Saba, Rosa Saba, Leia and Lucy Grainger
Artistic Process and Style
Initiated by Cathy Stubington and Lois Anderson, the interesting challenge for us in this project was to create theatrical presentations using scripts written to be read, rather than as scripts. We did not adapt the writing (other than leaving out a very few words). “The King of Capri” is an illustrated story, written by British author Jeanette Winterson and illustrated by Jane Ray. “The Tale of the Unknown Island” is a parable in novella form, by Portuguese-born Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago.
Both performances were devised in a two-week rehearsal time, by Director Varrick Grimes, with actors Lois Anderson, Thomas Conlin Jones and Jonathan Teague, along with puppet designer Cathy Stubington. (Musicians Murray MacDonald, performer Jaci Metivier, and five children completed the chorus for the “King of Capri”.)
The telling of the indoor story “The Tale of the Unknown Island” was enhanced with Stephan Bircher working with lighting and shadows. Joelysa Pankanea created music with her signature marimba, another character in the telling.
In“The King of Capri”, the clown/puppeteers came in and out of narrating. A whole element of the illustrated story is in the pictures, which while flat contain a lot of movement; we borrowed from this in the very lively storytelling, using a pile of objects based on the pictures, and lots of colourful fabrics. The audience was seated on bleachers very close to, almost inside, the story.
In “The Tale of the Unknown Island, one of the three storytellers delivered almost the whole text, with the other two being the puppeteers for the main characters of the Man and the Woman, and eventually being the Man and Woman themselves. The scale changed as the audience came closer, through the telling, to the thoughts of the man and the woman. Varrick applied his experience in promenade theatre, in which the audience is not located in a specific spot, but shifts position as the performance takes place in different parts of the space, sometimes tight and contained, other around and amongst the audience. It contributed to the dreamlike quality, and also to the audience becoming more and more deeply engaged in the two main characters’ intent.
The first scene was in miniature, and the audience was a distance a way looking at it. in the final scene, the Man climbed to a balcony in the space where there was a captain’s wheel; a sail was suddenly rigged up to the ceiling, and the audience was in the hold of the boat, on their way to the Unknown Island.