'Here it comes. Closer, closer. The ocean has come to kiss my feet. Let the waves come, let them eat away at this rock, my home, my cave, my cage. Let the ocean move in and bring with it all the world, the ancient whirlpool of our histories.'
A little mermaid trades her voice for legs. She dreams of a human world bathed in sun.
A group of teenagers trade stories about life in 2020. They dream of all the worlds that could have been.
Hans Christian Andersen's famous fairytale is radically re-imagined by a collective of teenage and adult theatre makers in The Mermaid by Cassandra Fumi. A surreal tapestry of history, poetry, tragicomedy and pop culture milieu is cast over us, woven together by many hands from many threads: H2O: Just Add Water. Planting trees. Private dreams. Global protest movements. Mythology. Murder. Jest. Love.
Only such a storied tapestry could have been woven together by young devisors who, like the little mermaid, were forced to confront and enact their own transformations in a year of being locked down. But where she relinquished her voice, they find theirs.
'A free-wheeling critique of the figure of the mermaid in popular culture… explores the hybridity of identity with an enigmatic smile.' — The Sydney Morning Herald