I finally found the magic of the sea

I won’t be in theatres with a notebook as much as usual this month – time for some wider, wetter horizons – but may be musing, as I often do, on how rare it is for theatre to express a convincing reality about the oceans and the trade or pursuit of seafaring.

- LIBBY PURVES

 

It’s easy for films – all that CGI, great sweeping pans across the waves to bring home the immensity and strangeness, the threat and joy of the element. Plenty of thrills in the cinema, whether you prefer the melancholy loneliness of Crowhurst, the period gung-ho of Napoleonic wars, or that yachting thriller with Nicole Kidman in a very impractical onboard bra-slip fighting off a psychopath.

But in stage plays the sea is a metaphor, a bit of language, or else, at best, a backdrop. Maybe the action is taking place on the docks, as in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, or else by the seaside, as in innumerable British comedies. Or maybe the seafaring all happened in the past, and now the lost sailor is coming back, usually having been thoroughly de-socialised by a lifetime at sea.

There was an excellent play this year about Harvard political de-platforming, called