Virtual reality play comes to Theatr Clwyd
Curious Directive comes to Theatr Clwyd with Frogman, a coming-of-age, virtual reality thriller which was the must-see show at the Edinburgh festival last year for its cutting-edge staging, fusing virtual reality with live theatre.
The play is set on the Great Barrier Reef, 1995 featuring with 11-year-old Meera enjoying her first sleepover.
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 of the realisation that those days are gone forever. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Directed by Jack Lowe, the show was three years in the making. Lowe worked alongside specialists in marine biology from Hull’s Deep Aquarium, coral reef scientist Jamie Craggs, Sebastian Hennige and Creative Technologist Ed Greig.
The creation of Frogman has included underwater film shoots in Australia and Indonesia and was made in close collaboration with schools from Hull and Backbone Youth Arts, Brisbane, a leading Australian experimental youth theatre.
Together they have created the show exploring themes of childhood, parenthood and the impending coral reef bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.
Annabel Betts 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
