Review: plenty of fish in the sea is a thrilling adventure
Devised by Emily Ayoub, Madeline Baghurst, Adam Lee and Tobhiyah Stone Feller, presented by Clockfire Theatre Company
Review by Charlotte Smee
How many times have you been told that “there’s plenty of fish in the sea”, despite having plenty of apps and no matches on any of them? How many times have you accidentally told a first date you met on an app about another weird date you had, only to realise you’ve now made this one weird? How many times have you caught the wrong boat to a tiny island off the coast of France?
That last one might be zero for you, but it's one for the English backpacker that is the narrator of plenty of fish in the sea (played by Adam Lee) — which is a lot if you think about it. In the style of the absurd fable by the likes of Kafka, Beckett or Camus, plenty of fish starts in a fairly regular way, with the unnamed backpacker telling a Tinder date in a pub about the time he got separated from his Contiki tour and then caught the wrong boat to the isolated Saint-Cotriade. From there, his trip becomes more and more strange as he tries to communicate with a fish-obsessed French nun who doesn’t speak English (Madeline Baghurst) and her assistant Bernadette who has taken a vow of silence (Emily Ayoub).
Stage/costume design by Tobhiya Stone Feller, sound design by Mary Rapp and lighting design by Dominic Hort work as hard as the performers do to create changing locations including a busy pub, a tiny monastery room and the endless seaside. They use only a single bed, wardrobe, chair, hanging picture frame and well-designed ambient noise to great effect. Transitions between places on boats, in storms and in dream-like states are excitingly theatrical, with the performers physically matching the swinging frame, moving bed, spinning wardrobe and crashing wave sounds as if the entire stage were being thrown around in the wind. Sound levels and Nun’s English subtitles weren’t always on point, and this meant that parts of the dialogue were lost or muffled, but the ideas behind them were well intentioned.
Clockfire Theatre Company and director Emily Ayoub have a keen eye for the theatrical image. Some of my favourites included Bernadette’s short introduction with nothing but a cardboard sign that read “je suis en silence”, Nun cheekily turning her eye to the audience between flashing lights as she took something she shouldn’t have, the holy trinity of fish, potato and salt held up from a wardrobe-turned-kitchen-window and Bernadette sinking behind a bed as if she were a fish, complete with a gaping mouth.
Images and quirky events like these make plenty of fish in the sea a thrilling adventure, but the most difficult (and delightful) part of absurd fables is that they often have a central message they are trying to communicate to us in a wonky, metaphorical way. This play does have a central, cyclical, message, and part of it is to do with our failures to communicate with each other through dating apps – Mr Backpacker is unable to find the perfect catch, until he meets Bernadette and has a fleeting obsession with her (while she silently, passively receives his affection), and in relaying this story to another potential “catch” he struggles to recreate that sense of connection. Absurdist theatre and fiction have an overwhelmingly masculine history and, while that’s another essay, I do wonder whether this story might have been told in a way that further challenged the stereotypes of the silent, mysterious woman as a love interest, and the foreign man with something to learn and teach from said mysterious woman.
These stereotypes, of course, aren’t entirely Clockfire’s doing, and plenty of fish in the sea uses fish and fishing as an interesting metaphor for internet dating. The performances are inventive, physical and hilarious, and the rest of the team works together well to achieve a singular vision of what the modern absurd fable could be. It only leaves something to be desired for those of us looking for a deeply wonky tale that calls into question the arbitrary conventions of trying to make ourselves known to each other in the Tinder era.
plenty of fish in the sea played at the Flying Nun by Brand X from 10 - 11 February 2023. Find more information here.
Collage by Ceridwen Bush, production images provided by Clockfire
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
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