Dark Seas

Despite all the singing and dancing and happy endings of the Disney version, The Little Mermaid was originally a very dark story. The way Hans Christian Anderson tells it, the prince marries another girl, the little mermaid's human legs make her feel as though she is “treading upon sharp knives”, the sea witch tries to get her to kill the prince in his sleep, and in the end she throws herself into the sea, turns into foam, ceasing to exist. Although director Ian Sinclair loves the Disney version, the modern retelling he and his cast have put toegther at the Blue Room is very much based on the original. The play is a devised work, assembled with the help of the actors, each playing modern versions of characters in the story. Jacinta Larcombe plays the character based on the little mermaid, who she describes as someone who doesn't really fit in. “The character's a weird girl, and I'm a little bit weird,” she laughs. Larcombe says the devising process began with a couple of weeks of one to two-hour improvisations in the space, where Sinclair would set the actors tasks or give them starting points – place everyday objects in the space for the actors to interact with, for example. From there, “We started doing a couple of scenes. We read the original story together and saw that there were themes of unrequited love, relationships between a grandmother and the little mermaid figure, and then we started improvising some scenes that could remake that story in a modern way.”

At one point, Sinclair sent the actors out into the Perth Cultural Centre in character, with instructions to bring back an object that reminded them of their character, or that they thought their character might pick up and keep. “I bumped into someone that I knew and just had to stay in character,” Larcombe admits. “It was really interesting. It was a fun task to do and it really opened my brain up. I went home thinking about the whole show.”

Larcombe's main background is actually in dance, with very little training in theatre: “I'm very body-based, and it's been quite challenging and scary for me to start to try and use my voice; to interact with others and not to be afraid that I might say the wrong thing, or stumble on the words, or if I'm not loud enough.” She admits the process has proved challenging, but feels this has been mitigated somewhat by her involvement in the devising process, where she was given the opportunity to create a character from scratch. “There's something special about devising, you know? It gives you that rush of being able to create something new. If you're working from scripts, it doesn't have that same excitement. It gives you a chance to start from scratch, start from nothing.”