SORRY WE DIDN'T DIE AT SEA Comes to the Park Theatre in September

A first translation of Italian playwright Emanuele Aldrovandi’s satirical, absurdist play darkly refracts Europe’s migration crisis. In a not-too-distant future, the continent's economies have collapsed, and three travellers find that the tables have turned as they are forced to flee the very countries which had once closed their borders to migrants. Placing their lives at the mercy of a mysterious people-smuggler, they embark on a journey in a claustrophobic shipping container in the hopes of a better life. Sorry We Didn’t Die At Sea is a dark and comic play that asks audiences to consider the contingency of migrant status, the fragility of civil society, and the risks we run by ignoring the power of the natural world.

Emanuele Aldrovandi is an Italian playwright with multiple awards in his home country. His plays have been translated, performed and published in English, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Slovenian, Czech, Catalan and Arabic, and the plays he has translated into Italian include Trainspotting, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Laramie Project.

The cast has now been announced as Yasmine Haller (Comédie-Française), Felix Garcia Guyer (LIFT, Netflix), Will Bishop (Entropy, Park Theatre), and Marco Young (Another America, Park Theatre).

Director Daniel Emery said, “Italy and Britain have in common that our stories of irregular migration are dominated by the imaginarium of the sea. And we share governments prepared to turn sea crossings into contested political sites, over and above humanitarian concerns. This is the truth into which Sorry We Didn’t Die at Sea launches. It has only gained in resonance in the seven years since its writing: the Mediterranean crisis has become an annual event, and we have seen its refracted image in the North Sea. Sorry We Didn’t Die at Sea places this violence at its heart.”

The Playwright’s Laboratory is a new writing theatre company and online platform that streams industry readings of plays, offering playwrights an online platform to share their work with an international audience of industry professionals.

Riva Theatre is co-directed by Daniel Emery and Marco Young, and is focused on bringing plays from abroad to UK stages. This translation of Sorry We Didn’t Die at Sea, the piece’s first British-English version, was first staged at Seven Dials Playhouse in July 2022, and a reading of Emanuele Aldrovandi’s Allarmi, translated by Marco Young and directed by Daniel Emery, took place at Omnibus Theatre in 2023.

Daniel Emery is a European director and translator from South London. He is associate director of both Peckham Levels Theatre and Shipwright, Deptford, staging radical live work in South East London. Daniel is a committee member of translation collective Art Translated. As director, his work includes: Pillow Talk (Pleasance, Edinburgh; Second City, Chicago; UCB, New York), Peter Pan: A Cabaret Pantomime (Shipwright), John Tothill: The Last Living Libertine (Pleasance).

Marco Young is a British-Italian translator and actor. He began translating Italian theatre into English in early 2020, and is particularly interested in politically engaged contemporary Italian pieces discussing migration, journeys and the threat of the far-right. He was a mentee on the 2022-23 Foreign Affairs Theatre Translator Mentorship Programme, for which his translation of Suburban Miracles by Gabriele Di Luca was showcased at Camden People’s Theatre in January 2023. He was a member of Mercury Theatre Colchester’s Producer Development Programme 2022-2023.

Park Theatre presents exceptional theatre in the heart of Finsbury Park, boasting two world-class performance spaces: Park200 for predominantly larger scale productions by established talent, and Park90, a flexible studio space, for emerging artists. In ten years, it has enjoyed eight West End transfers (including Rose starring Maureen Lipman, The Boys in the Band starring Mark Gatiss, Pressure starring David Haig and The Life I Lead starring Miles Jupp), two National Theatre transfers, 14 national tours, six Olivier Award nominations, has won multiple OffWestEnd Offie Awards and won a Theatre of the Year award from The Stage. Park Theatre are grateful to all those who have donated to the Park Life fund, supporting the venue through the pandemic.

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