Simon Harvey directs his joyful and often surreal adaptation of US novelist Jim Dodge’s international best-seller, Fup, a wonderfully strange and uproarious modern fable about family, love, loss and an overweight whiskey-swilling duck.
Fup will return as part of the Asylum season, Kneehigh’s award-winning purpose built tent, located in The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall, where it played a limited run in 2016. Following the Asylum, it will embark on a UK tour to Nottingham, Warwick, Liverpool and Southampton.
One hundred year old Grandaddy Jake Santee and his enormous grandson Tiny live life on the fringes, drinking the home distilled Ol’ Death Whisper, building fences and boasting of immortality. But then, Fup arrives – a movie-loving mallard with an insatiable appetite whose extraordinary presence transforms their lives forever.
Hilarious, heart-warming and magical; Fup celebrates eccentricity and all that is natural and uncompromising about rural living. Harvey has transposed Dodge’s cult novella to the wilds of
Cornwall, featuring original, live foot-stomping music by composer Ben Sutcliffe, sublime quacking puppetry and lashings of Kneehigh irreverence and fun.
The full cast is Zaid Al-Rikabi (Musician), Jenny Beare (Gabrielle), Calvin A. Dean (Tiny), Rachel Leonard (Fup), Dave Mynne (Grandaddy Jake) and Ben Sutcliffe (Musician).
