At Sea, Staring Up at The New Stage

The young Australian dramatist Finegan Kruckemeyer possesses a narrative voice endowed with inexhaustible imagination. His characters both tell and live their stories, with their fates entangling and disentangling, and their tales unexpectedly blending together. Noah, the Englishman, lives in Bristol, taking care of the community garden and mourning his deceased Italian wife, who has died during a road accident. Caleb, the Australian, is haunted by nightmares and vivid dreams, and even loses his job because of one of them. He moves to England, where he meets the dreamy girl Silvia. Emma, the Icelander, alias “the Greek”, arrives at the conclusion that she is cursed: both of her brothers have died in dramatic circumstances at sea, while staring at her. So as to prevent the death of her beloved father, she decides to never return from the sea. Elise, the German from Braunschweig, drives her car with her little son every night, as it is the only way how to make the brain-damaged boy sleepy, as well as how to avoid making a decision between her husband and her lover. Silvia, who is capable of appearing and disappearing (she is evidently a sorceress), in some way or another influences the lives of all the four characters, also bringing about their unexpected encounters and revelations. Kruckemeyer’s play At Sea, Staring Up was premiered in 2012 at the Jute Theatre in Cairns, Australia, and if we were to define its style, we could label it modern-time magic realism.