Puppets, created by Yvonne Stone, represent a giant sow, bendy-limbed elders, even a growing baby. Sill and her co-designer, Mark Friend, have created a stage dominated by three translucent screens through which we glimpse floating corpses, swimming dolphins, predatory man-eaters. What the story lacks is the spellbinding clarity you find in the best children's fiction. It might also be about the human urge to overcome death embodied, on the island, by Locaha and, in the Victorian world, by a Russian flu pandemic.īut what you get on stage is a loose congregation of myths that boils down to a series of set-pieces: Mau confronting a shark, Daphne making a Dantesque journey into the underworld and both of them learning to kill. Or it could be a modern Coral Island about a displaced adolescent's adjustment to the world of nature. What does it all signify? You could see it as a Tempest-like story of cultural collision in which Mau is forced to acknowledge his nation's lost historic glories. But, inevitably, their idyll is interrupted by the arrival of the remnants of Victorian civilisation. Daphne, meanwhile, achieves a post-colonial maturity through delivering a baby, milking a pig and even rescuing Mau from death. Mau, elected chief by the surviving islanders, grows to manhood and learns bravery, courage and fearlessness.
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