Mortal Coil makes fairies and flowers fly in The Faerie Play

With The Faerie Play, Mortal Coil again takes the idea of site-specific theatre to new heights, amid the crops, woods, and sunflowers

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      It’s transformed Stanley Park’s minitrain area into a Brothers Grimm forest one year and a macabre Mother Goose garden another. It’s brought back the historical figures of the Britannia Heritage Shipyard. And now Mortal Coil Performance Society is preparing to bring the three-and-a-half acres of sunflower patches, woods, and lush rolling crops of Richmond’s Sharing Farm to life with puppets, stilts, music, and theatre—once again taking the concept of site-specificity to new heights.

      “The farm has a number of fields and then this wonderful wood lot that we’ve cleared out so we could use the area in the middle of it for a staging area,” enthuses Mortal Coil’s Peter Hall, adding he’s heard a screech-owl nest each day he’s been in the forest. 

      Hall is directing the interactive, outdoor The Faerie Play, and speaking to the Straight from his car as he delivers puppets to their costume-maker. “There are huge garlic fields, and a 32-foot sunflower circle has been grown for us. We’ve also asked them to grow particular flowers to match particular characters we’re imagining—hollyhocks, dahlias, zinnias.”

      The idea behind the play is to invite people into the Sharing Farm, which grows crops for food banks, and have them learn the value of both farming and nourishment in a creative way. The facility’s executive director, James Gates, approached Mortal Coil after the successful run of its Salmon Row at the shipyard in 2011 and 2013, hoping the group could animate the workings of the farm in the same way it had the history of the maritime area in Richmond.

      Reconceiving a play of the same name that was staged at the Interior’s organic Curly Willow Farm by Runaway Moon Theatre, Mortal Coil set about customizing the piece to the working farm.

      “I expanded the breadth of the theme, so it’s not just about farming, but also encompasses the land and who is invested in the land and who is worthy of sharing in the land,” explains Hall. “So there are not just vegetables but Cooper’s hawks, and they’re nesting right there. And there are voles, the scourge of the farm—they say, ‘The food is grown for us.’ So basically it has an ecological message.”

      The story follows several children from a local theatre school, one of whom gets stolen by one of the farm’s resident fairies. The audience has to join the cast in following their trail and trying to find the girl before she disappears forever into the fairy world.

      To bring the characters and creatures to life, Mortal Coil uses a diversity of puppets, including traditional First Nations designs by members of Tsatsu Stalqayu Coastal Wolfpack, with Salish-style carved wooden heads. Also expect to see a Cooper’s hawk fluttering high above the audience on a tall pole, three singing rod puppets that look like little voles, and a potato puppet who has his own spa where he gets washed. Elsewhere, scarecrows come to life and the ghosts of the land’s First Nations past appear.

      Music will accompany visitors all along the journey. “The music is by Tobin Stokes and there is singing,” Hall says, “but we also have an accordion—and more. Out of nowhere, all these kids played instruments—one plays recorder and sax, another clarinet, another violin.” Hall adds adult actors also bring ukulele, guitar, and Guatemalan flute to the mix, with percussion on hand, thanks to rattles and paddles. “And if I have my way we’ll get some kazoos in there!” Hall says.

      But more than anything, Mortal Coil, once better known as stilt walkers you’d see at festivals and the Halloween Ghost Train, has found a thriving new theatrical niche. While it does more traditional “black-box” work, such as The Boy With the Enchanted Hands at Presentation House Theatre early this year, Mortal Coil has made its name pulling history and stories out of certain sites—as it did with the canning past at the Britannia shipyard, and as it is doing now on the farm. In both cases, the City of Richmond has come aboard to help with funding.

      Mortal Coil is busier than it’s ever been, building new kinds of theatre, in unexpected places. And in the process, it’s reaching new audiences with fun, interactive shows that have deeper messages.

      The Faerie Play fits in with our mandate of doing family-based theatre in the best sense of the word: even though this one is geared for kids 6 to 12 it will, like any good theatre, appeal to anybody—just like the Ghost Train entertains adults,” Hall points out. “But we don’t shy away from a political mandate, either. In this case it’s economically and socially based: this farm grows food for underprivileged families.

      “So we’ve moved from a dance-stilt company to a company that respects its origins, and developing them further to explore all kinds of issues and styles of theatre.” You could say that, like the Sharing Farm, it’s harvesting the results of years of careful tending and growing.

      Mortal Coil’s The Faerie Play runs at the Sharing Farm in Richmond from next Wednesday (August 5) to August 15.

      Follow Janet Smith on Twitter @janetsmitharts.

      Comments