I know what you’re thinking: another comedy-horror science-fiction pantomime pirate show interspersed with operatic sea shanties? But fear not – for better or worse, you’ve never seen anything quite like Bladderwrack.
The fever-dream brainchild of co-writers and co-directors Adam Browne and David Tredinnick, Bladderwrack requires no plot summary. As the play repeatedly assures you, there isn’t one. Positioning itself within the Theatre of the Absurd, Bladderwrack’sBeckettian ambitions manifest in the borderline incomprehensible (and certainly inconsequential) babblings of two delirious pirates: Saucy Jack and Bagfoot.
Trapped “in the chilldrippery of a sunken galleon” (read: a sunken pirate ship) and sustained by the “bile-green phosphorescent bladderwrack” and “eyeless, dark-adapted ghastlies” (read: seaweed and fish), Saucy Jack and Bagfoot dwell in extravagant misery. According to Bagfoot’s calculations, their torture has lasted either 40 or 300 years – long enough for the two men to become embedded in the bilge’s grim ecosystem. If the goal was to make us, too, feel as if we’ve been trapped in a confined, inhospitable environment for either 40 or 300 years, they succeeded resoundingly.
Saucy Jack and Bagfoot – performed by Tredinnick and Oscar Munro respectively – are Bladderwrack’s approximation of Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon. Tredinnick’s Saucy Jack is a limping, eye-patch-wearing loon who takes Beckett’s devaluation of language to the extreme, while Munro’s Bagfoot evokes a black-out drunk, vaguely British Adam Sandler. They may not know what’s going on (that makes three of us), but they’re having a good time nonetheless.
Though horrifying, the various puppets – made by Jules Chapple, Emma Jevons and Katerina Petratos – are expertly crafted. The highlight of Bladderwrack, however,is undoubtedly the live sound effects. Created in real-time by giggling foleys who sit in plain sight for the play’s duration, the various props used to mimic wind, water, and even seizures heighten the world’s absurdity with unpredictable glee. At one point, Petratos just straight-up said the word “splash.” I’ll admit, I chuckled.
With that said, Bladderwrack practically begs for an editor willing to wield a red pen like a sword. For one, the interjections by Tredinnick’s pirate-journalist Saltpetre Cragshank — brandishing a hook-hand-quill hybrid and delivering monologues so unrelenting I entered a fugue state — grind the show’s already slow pacing to a halt. If some of the needlessly lengthy ramblings had been trimmed, perhaps the actors wouldn’t have needed their scripts (shamelessly perched on lit music stands) for reference.
Bladderwrack is a staunch reminder that absurd does not always mean funny, nor does it always mean entertaining. Mostly, it functions as a bid to sell merch, which Tredinnick shills at every opportunity. Don’t get me wrong: this show is for somebody – I just suspect pretentious 25-year-old English majors are not its target demographic.
If the thought of a three-minute-long fart interlude or a lady ship with an enormous rack birthing a nightmare-fuel puppet makes you shiver your timbers, you won’t be disappointed.
