Sorry We Didn’t Die At Sea – Park Theatre, London

An Italian play translated into English, Sorry We Didn’t Die at Sea transports Park Theatre audiences to a dark, surrealist world in which the desperate pay people smugglers to escape from Europe.

Sorry We Didn’t Die At Sea

The premise is intriguing.  In an alternate or perhaps near-future reality, Europe is now a place to escape from rather than to.  As in any situation of irregular emigration, people smugglers take the lucky (?) few with means to Venezuela, Australia, Japan.  As the play opens we meet some typical migrants: the Stocky One (Marco Young), the Beautiful One (Yasmine Haller) and the Tall One (Will Bishop).  All four originated the roles in English at an earlier run at the Seven Dials Playhouse. Young is also the translator from Emanuele Aldrovandi’s original Italian.

As in any story of desperation, each character has their own reasons for leaving.  The Stocky One claims to be on the run and spins tales of the luxuries awaiting him (but only if the ship is really going to Venezuela).  The Tall One is immediately marked out for not being desperate enough, not having reached rock bottom.  The Beautiful One plays her cards close to the chest, and must also be on the lookout for sexual violence as the only woman.  Elements of their stories will chime with those of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. But we never get the feeling of really getting beneath the skin of these characters.

The Burly One (Felix Garcia Guyer) plays an interesting dual role.  He’s a menacing and possibly psychopathic people smuggler by day, and entertainer-of-the-audience-with-Wikipedia-facts by night.  Armed with an unnecessary microphone, he regales us between scenes with pasta recipes, or facts about shipping containers and shipwrecks.  It provides some light relief and makes the contrast with his terrifying persona all the greater. But it’s nonetheless perhaps the clearest indicator of this being an undeniably odd play.

But What Does It Tell Us?

Sorry We Didn’t Die At Sea is a one-act play of roughly 90 minutes.  It can be broken into two halves: the scenes of setting off and the journey in the shipping container; and what happens after the ship is wrecked and the characters find themselves adrift.  I won’t spoil too much, but a look at the show’s content warnings will give you a pretty good idea.  These latter scenes ratchet up the tension, but also took me away from parallels with the current refugee crisis and into more extreme territory.

All this left me wondering what message playwright Emanuele Aldrovandi wanted to convey.  Perhaps it’s also a slightly odd work in Italian, but I was no wiser by the end as to what I should be taking away from it.  Empathy with refugees and migrants? A reminder of how fragile civility is when under pressure? A bleak outlook on Europe’s future? Instead I focused on the quality of the performances, which were uniformly committed and credible.  Will Bishop’s nervous and bumbling Tall One was a lovely moment of comic relief in several scenes, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Garcia Guyer’s dark and menacing Burly One.  Marco Young as The Stocky One has the biggest character arc from boastful con artist to something deeper, while the reservation of The Beautiful One makes the character’s growth as portrayed by Yasmine Haller much more subtle.

A final high note from me was the design.  Alys Whitehead, always a creative designer of sets, has here whipped up a shipping container by the simplest of means: a red curtain which can be extended back and forth.  It keeps the action contained (no pun intended) and allows for some scenes to happen away from the audience’s gaze.  The set and costume design is well complemented by sound design from Jamie Lie and lighting by Catja Hamilton.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3/5

Sorry We Didn’t Die at Sea on until 30 September 2023. Tickets and further details here.