DramaLondonReviewUncategorized

Sea Creatures – Hampstead Theatre, London

Reviewer: Jane Darcy

Writer: Cordelia Lynn

Director: James Macdonald

Cordelia Lynn’s Sea Creatures is set in a cottage by the sea where a mother, her lover and two of her three daughters spend the summer swimming, cooking and playing games. But this apparently realist setup is not all it seems. Like a turning tide, a flood of strange folk tales regularly sweeps in making the sea shore and its inhabitants strange too.

Shirley, played with dexterous wit by Geraldine Alexander, is an academic, a philosopher concerned with distinguishing differences. Her new thesis, she announces, is that there’s no difference between absence and presence. In the real world it is obvious her wits have wandered. She returns from a walk saying she has seen seals, but is gently reminded that this in fact happened years before in Ireland. But in another way she is profoundly in touch with absence – the absence of her own parents and now her daughter Robin who has mysteriously disappeared.

Her lover Sarah (a warm performance from Thusitha Jayasundera) is the calm centre of the household, cooking for everyone and retiring to paint in her studio. We learn she took on Shirley’s three little daughters unquestioningly years before. Fred the Fisherman drops round for tea and can be bribed to tell stories. One involves a human maiden who gave herself to a man from the sea, and was ruined and abandoned. She goes on to curse everyone and everything.

There is perhaps a deliberate echo of this maiden in Shirley’s daughter George (a lively Pearl Chanda) whose late pregnancy goes more or less unremarked by her family. She is feisty rather than forlorn, however, although like her mythical double she is quick to curse anyone making innocent inquiries about the baby. A trickier character is the youngest, pyjama-clad Toni, whose speech and body language at first suggest she is still a child. When Mark, the boyfriend of the missing Robin comes to stay, he alternately humours Toni and challenges her. Exactly how old is she? – 22. Has she ever been kissed? – No, but she claims she’s had sex. Grace Saif plays Toni with a certain charm, but the problem with Toni’s characterisation is that she is stuck forever playing faux-naïve, so the charm can wear a bit thin.

Mark, the male visitor, a thoughtful Tom Mothersdale, is a strange beast, sometimes the ponderous PhD mansplainer – going on about the patriarchy and liminal spaces – sometimes someone more troubled and so potentially more interesting. Given playwright Cordelia Lynn’s espousal of mystery – the backstories of the other characters are kept deliberately minimal – he does not, perhaps, need to spell out the exact nature of his psychological damage in childhood. But his is the character who has most to learn, and we see him become more in tune with the gently surreal family atmosphere the longer he stays.

All the action takes place within the cottage, but the sea itself is a powerful presence throughout thanks to the imaginative sound design by Max Pappenheim and lighting by Jack Knowles, particularly their vivid capturing of a thunderstorm. James Macdonald’s tight direction means that the often comic surface of the play is always maintained.

Sea Creatures is an ambitious play that seeks to blend complex philosophical themes, poetic symbolism and folklore. If it doesn’t fully succeed it is not because Lynn’s script is over-cluttered – her writing is admirably deft and economical – but because of her likeable tendency to be cheerily upbeat. Perhaps a bit of darkness would help.

Runs until 29 April 2023

The Reviews Hub Score

ambitious, poetic, over-sunny

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The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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