Renowned theatre-makers curious directive return to London for the first time since 2016 with their boldly ambitious Frogman. This much admired coming-of-age VR thriller was the must-see show at the Edinburgh festival last year for its cutting-edge staging, fusing virtual reality with live theatre.
The Great Barrier Reef, 1995. Meera is eleven. It’s her first sleepover. Strawberry Dunkaroos, Sega Mega Drive and coral fragment analysis descends into torch-lit storytelling from sleeping bags.
This new re-worked version will play London’s Shoreditch Town Hall from 4 to 14 April and the Artsdepot from 17 – 21 April. It will then travel to Norwich Theatre Royal from 24 – 28 April with further autumn UK and International dates to be announced shortly.
With an increased capacity of 50 audiences members, all simultaneously in VR, Frogman blurs the lines between reality and fiction, the physical and the virtual in a truly ground-breaking production.
Frogman submerges the audience deep into the Great Barrier Reef and carefree summers of long ago. Blending youthful nostalgia with a dark sense of haunting unease, the show captures that yearning to return to purer days, real or imagined and the pain at the realisation that those days are gone forever. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Georgina Strawson plays Meera and will be performing live on stage. The cast also includes voice work from Johnny Flynn as Douglas Clarke, Anna Procter as Cathy Selbourne, Kate Shenton as Jen Philips and Russell Woodhead as Ryan Willis.
The VR cast features four non-professional young actors from schools in Brisbane, Australia. They are Ava Ryan (aged 11) as Young Meera, Indiah Morris (11) as Lily McCullen, Sol Castanho (11) as Shaun Jacobs and Milla Webb (13) as Ashleigh Richardson.
Directed by Artistic Director and Founder Jack Lowe, the show was three years in the making and Lowe worked alongside specialists in marine biology from Hull’s Deep Aquarium, coral reef scientist Jamie Craggs (Horniman Museum), Sebastian Hennige (Heriot-Watt) and Creative Technologist Ed Greig (Deloitte Digital).
