Film and production photos of performance of realised extracts from the 3rd year final individual project, my design for ‘Riders to the Sea’ by Vaughan Williams.

The design is as if the characters are in their little cottage but they are floating in a space, detached from the world. The objects are in a set of monochrome tones, like an old photograph, allowing the brighter, flowing characters to emerge. There are drips and stalactite-like structures everywhere, as if water is permeating everywhere and everything all the time. The characters themselves have flowing skirts that ripple and waft as they move, representing the waves of the sea. Both the characters and the music represent the sea – everything is affected by it and is consumed by it.

It was important to have the noise of the sea discernible underneath the music and coming through in the quiet moments, as that was the intention in basing the speculative project at the Minack Theatre in Cornwall, where the sea would literally be all around.

For the performance, the two daughters, Cathleen and Nora, were merged into one, and I also played Maurya. Maurya has lost five of her six sons, her husband, and her father-in-law to the sea – in the first of these extracts she and her last son, Bartley, have parted on a bad word as he is heading overseas to a horse market, and she fears he will die too. Her daughter is persuading her to go and intercept him to speak to him before he leaves. In the second extract, she returns, having seen Bartley but been unable to speak to him because he was being followed by her fifth son, Michael’s, ghost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TczcK8ybGc