Bladderwrack

In the underdeck chilldrippery of a sunken galleon, in its deepest bowels, two ancient pirates dwell in suspended misery: Saucy Jack and Bagfoot, their lives sustained by the ecosystem that has overtaken the bilge around them.

Thanks to the bile-green phosphorescent bladderwrack that thrives on the flooded deck, their air refuses to run out – and thanks to the eyeless, dark-adapted ghastlies that swim among those weeds, their food refuses to run out also. So the men have lived for decades.

Their madness is monumental.

Each man’s is particular to himself. Saucy Jack’s is rooted in guilt. He’s in a constant battle with it, and his weapon is diversion. He’s a fabulist, a reliable narrator, in that he can always be relied on to lie. Even in his wretched state, he lights the dark with his fantastic tales – of a disease that produces diamonds from men’s sores – of a ship whose sailors are babies – and others.

But the question is, what is he trying to hide? Something not good, that's certain. Something that happened during the naval engagement that sank the ship -- the fateful attack from the monstrous Captain Manrose, with his pink-hulled abomination of a galleon and its awful signature perfume…

His companion, Bagfoot, is madder still.

Dressed in an amazement of rags, this elderly privateer differs from Jack in that he’s happy to be here… After all, what's the point in being miserable? Count your blessings, that's his motto! He has food, he has shelter, he has his cosy spot in the nest of ropes above the flooded deck. And he has companionship too; not only in Saucy Jack, but also in the form of a mysterious woman – unseen, her voice drifting in the darkness – the ship’s figurehead, sailing on the slow waves of his dreams…

By her, and by Saucy Jack’s ramblings, we learn about the ship herself. The Vivisectress. She is ancient, epic, huge, made heavier than her actual weight by the gravitas of age. Antiquity touches her timbers through and through. There are rumours that once, long ago, she was a flagship of old Carthage. Jack tells of wandering through her lower decks, encountering remnants of her previous incarnations: archaic fittings, enginery and furbishments buried behind her bulkheads like the vestigial foot-bones in the flukes of a whale…

These are the settings and the characters of Bladderwrack. The play is bleak, hilarious, outrageous. It asks its audience: in a prison of your own making, is survival still worth it? And what happens when the world refuses to let you die?