OBSERVER: The Ship
Loosely based on a novella by Stefan Zweig, The Ship relates the story of a reclusive passenger haunted by memories of the past.
Under the direction of Fini Liu, the tale is related in a manner that combines theatrical forms and languages.
An Ariel like narrator sets the scene with a folded paper boat and a bowl of water. What unfolds as the action takes over is a chess competition on board with that passenger, who wants to remain anonymous, outsmarting a champion player.
But we discover the man’s past as we transcend time discovering he has been persecuted by an autocratic regime.
His only consolation was a book on chess that gave his life form, logic and structure.
The ingenuity of this work lies in how deftly the audience is moved between time and location with a simple alteration of a set and through the physicality of performance.
The whipping of a shirt on the floor is manifest in the responses of the passenger lying prone on the bed.
There is no disconnection between the two. And the multilingual nature of the work is aided by projected translations on cloth hanging from the ceiling.
We see a projection at the end of the play of the very bowl in which the paper boat is cast adrift in real time.
We never discover how that passenger escaped incarceration, which is the one weak link in the narrative, but what is realised is the psychological trauma inflicted on one over time where a tune or an action by another, however well meaning, can be misinterpreted and trigger memories experienced in the past.
This is inventive theatre with a cast working collaboratively to convey a universal message about vulnerability and the human reality of trauma.
Review by David McLean