Sorry We Didn’t Die at Sea [Charles Flint]

EMANUELE Aldrovandi’s play, translated from the Italian by Marco Young, offers an alternative story of European migration. Set in the near future, three nameless individuals (Will Bishop, Yasmine Haller and Young) have paid a smuggler (Felix Garcia Guyer) to leave Europe.

Immediately there are tensions. The smuggler takes their phones and their money. Young’s character, referred to as “The Stocky One” wants Bishop’s “The Tall One” to lend him 600 dollars and offers to pay him interest on the loan. Haller’s young woman, “The Beautiful One”, is from north Africa, but arrived in Europe when she was a child and the continent was “full of possibility”.

They are sealed into a claustrophobic shipping container, where they bicker and reveal select details about their pasts. We learn that the tall one is actually a writer wanting to document the experience of risking everything for a new start.

Inexplicably, the smuggler grabs a microphone and riffs on various subjects from shipping containers to shipwrecks and time; he even includes a recipe. He tells us he’s lonely and talks to himself. “I learn things off by heart and then I repeat them. And as I repeat them I change them.” But his surreal asides add little to the central drama.

A red curtain evokes a sense of sails and (perhaps) the sea, but is largely distracting. After they are shipwrecked the play turns considerable darker. The survivors may have to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.

Director Daniel Emery sets a frenetic pace and the actors give it their all. Aldrovandi’s tragi-comedy starts from an interesting premise but he never develops it into anything believable and leaves the actors stranded in a drama that fails to land.

until Sept 30
parktheatre.co.uk/