The first thing I must say about Eva Tausig’s The Little Mermaid is that it owes much more to the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale than the sugar-coated Disney musical. This is an exploration of desire, temptation and jealousy. Our heroine doesn’t swan her way towards a classic happy ending, but hobbles painfully towards making the ultimate decision: her own death or the death of the one she loves.
The intimate Burton Taylor studio is divided into two, and the audience is directed to their seats (by which I mean less than comfortable upturned black buckets), the location of which is dependant on whether their ticket-stub shows a picture of a foot or of a fin. There are two worlds at work here, delineated by a giant net. It is used effectively as a barrier between the world of the prince and the world of the mermaid and her family, and is a constant visual reminder of the failure to connect and their impossible and unattainable love.
Flashing lights shoot through the darkness with variable effect. The Blue-Peter-esque tin foil moon which the male characters wave emphatically from time to time is unconvincing and a little tacky. However, the genuinely unnerving moments when our mermaid visits the sea-witch (played with delightful cruelty by Leo-Marcus Wan) are certainly aided by the eerie blue lights and the rippling shadows of waving material. The music – a collaboration of electronic sounds, classical snippets, folk song and, at one point, a live cello performance – is a tad intrusive at the beginning but improves as the play develops, often adding poignancy to scenes, especially those between the mermaid and the prince.
This play demands audience participation. From time to time unwitting observers are made to carry oars, wear sailors’ hats or stand up pretending to be statues. I did feel that this played no real role in the progress of the story, and for a play that otherwise took itself so seriously as to abolish any humour from the action and script, these absurd interjections didn’t quite fit.
Sometimes The Little Mermaid felt as if it were dragging on, which largely stems from a script which is gratuitous with description, repetitive, and filled with redundant ‘he said/she saids’. If you want a truly well-written piece of drama, this is not for you. However the physical movement and aesthetic gracefulness of the piece makes up for the weakness. Lottie Norris gives a superb performance as the mermaid, as she hypnotises with her twirling and pirouetting. She is as sombre and heart-wrenching in the scenes of sadness as she is tempestuous and desperate in those of drama. Though the play is far from perfect, The Little Mermaid is an engaging and moving piece of drama which left few dry eyes by the end of the show.
Three stars out of five
