SORRY WE DIDN’T DIE AT SEA at the Park Theatre
★★½
“There are moments of excellence … but in the end the story just doesn’t quite hold”
Sorry We Didn’t Die at Sea, directed by Daniel Emery, is a surreal satire about the perils of people-smuggling. Set in a near-future, Europe’s economy has collapsed and three English citizens place their trust in a human trafficker, setting off to an unknown destination in his brand-new shipping container.
While there’s the obvious social commentary – what if Europeans were the ones arriving illegally on foreign shores, desperate for help – on the whole this is more about the dynamics of an unlikely trio forced to rely on each other in order to survive.
The setting consists of a three-sided red curtain. It serves both as the walls for the shipping container and as a backdrop to the smuggler’s surreal barker-like digressions in which he educates the audience on random bits of information he’s picked up from the internet on these long, boring journeys: pasta recipes, the etymology of “empathy”, the history of the shipping container. Felix Garcia Guyer, playing the smuggler, or as he’s known in the programme, “The Burly One”, is, as with the rest of the characters, a caricature of a person. But his combination of intimidating ruffian and bizarrely well-informed lunatic brings an unknown element to the otherwise fairly plodding plot.
Marco Young’s “The Stocky One”, escaping from a serious conviction, is off-set by Will Bishop’s “The Tall One”, a clueless toff. And as the only woman on stage, Yasmine Haller is, predictably, “The Beautiful One”.
The story of human trafficking gone wrong is a major one, and it’s easy to see why writer Emanuele Aldrovandi would whittle it down to these archetypal characters, but it results in the story losing its way somewhat. It’s hard to know what we’re supposed to take away from it and on top of that, after 95 minutes straight through, the ending simply trails off.
There are moments of excellence, and the conversations around what one is willing to do to survive are genuinely brutal, but in the end the story just doesn’t quite hold.
SORRY WE DIDN’T DIE AT SEA at the Park Theatre
Reviewed on 14th September 2023
by Miriam Sallon
Photography by Charles Flint
Previously reviewed at this venue:
The Garden Of Words | ★★★ | August 2023
Bones | ★★★★ | July 2023
Paper Cut | ★★½ | June 2023
Leaves of Glass | ★★★★ | May 2023
The Beach House | ★★★ | February 2023
Winner’s Curse | ★★★★ | February 2023
The Elephant Song | ★★★★ | January 2023
Rumpelstiltskin | ★★★★★ | December 2022
Wickies | ★★★ | December 2022
Pickle | ★★★ | November 2022
Sorry we Didn’t Die at Sea
Sorry we Didn’t Die at Sea
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