Shown as part of Edinburgh’s International Science Festival, Lost At Sea is the latest production by Catherine Wheels Theatre Company - Scotland’s most prolific, endlessly innovative, producer of theatre for children.
Catherine Wheels’ latest adventure begins with two children on two beaches in Scotland. One gets quickly whisked away to encounter very different beside-the-sea experiences in exotic locations like Australia, Alaska and Hawaii. The other remains attached to the Isle of Harris, daily combing the beach, collecting any interesting-looking stuff that might possibly have a story attached to it. It’s not long before both of them, at opposite ends of the earth, are caught up in the search for yellow plastic ducks - which brings us to the strange-but-true story at the heart of this production.
On 10th January 1992, 28,800 plastic ducks and other bath toys were washed overboard from a container ship in the Pacific Ocean. Subsequently, beachcombers, oceanographers and environmentalists, among others, have searched and found thousands of them washed up on beaches around the world. The time and place of their arrival on land has been used by scientists to trace global ocean circulation. The study of rotating ocean currents called ‘gyres’, also revealed the disturbing extent of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.
Covering the whole floor of the performance space is a giant map of the world which, when seen laid out and close-up like this, emphasises just how much of our ‘earth’ is actually water. There’s also a whole lot of yellow plastic in the shape of little ducks that each of us is asked to place in one of the gyres in one of the oceans. As the story progresses, a whole lot more come out of hiding.
Ashley Smith and Laurie Brown – both great physical, versatile and hugely watchable performers – take us on an entertaining oceanic journey across the globe, playing different characters as they go, but returning, in the end, to the much-loved beach on Harris. The sense they leave us with is the way in which the oceans connect all of us to everyone else: there is actually only one body of water that circles and moves around this, our one and only planet. And plastic can change its form but can never disappear: there is never any throwing it away because there is no ‘away’. This is an important point to understand and it’s perhaps a shame that the environmental lesson got a bit lost in the waves of the story.