A Seafaring Adventure

Written by Australian playwright Damien Millar, Marlin explores the relationship between kids and their grandparents. When Billy Grogan’s dad never returns from a fishing expedition, her life takes a spiralling turn. That is, until she is whisked away on a seafaring adventure by the miraculous, titular fish. Billy comes up against some big challenges and must draw on her grandfather for support.

The grandparent-grandkid relationship is not one often explored in shows like this, Williams says. And yet there’s great power in the connection. “The grandfather is coming to terms with two things at once,” he says. “His son has died, and he has to deal with becoming a father again, to his granddaughter. The loss of his son kind of becomes overshadowed by this responsibility that’s forced upon him.”

Linking the two is this shared sense of loss, but also a sense of wonder and adventure. “In a way, the father and the marlin are metaphorically the same person,” says Williams, who also steps into the role of the father’s ghost. “I appear as the father, and I guess the marlin appears as the wild, the beautiful, and the untamed animal in us all.”

But the prospect of Williams playing a ghost didn’t really fly with his own young daughter. “She wasn’t very happy to hear that I was playing a dead dad! So she decided that I was a guardian angel, which, in a way, is kind of the sense of that character and the sense of the marlin.”

That is one of the beautiful things about puppets in theatre, for Williams. Having worked on Walking With Dinosaurs and King Kong, he has seen how both kids and adults welcome the opportunity to dive into what are often bizarre worlds while also feeling free to interpret things in their own way. “Kids will put different stories onto it that adults will not often see. They really do bring something entirely unique. They go there instantaneously. They just believe in that sense of play.

“Adults tend to hold onto the notion that there’s this thing made of foam, or whatever it is. Then probably 15 minutes into the show they no longer see the puppeteer and they’re there in the world. I love the surprise in an adult audience. They don’t go to see puppet shows very often because they think puppets are for kids, and then they’ll go, ‘Wow! I can’t believe that piece of wood made me cry!’ It’s always fun when adults discover something inside them that stirs.”

Williams says that one of the play’s most remarkable interactions occurs when Billy and her grandad, played by Ashlea Pyke and Christopher Bunworth, wrestle with the marlin. In that moment, there’s imagination, energy and beauty in the connection between storytelling, people and puppets.

Southbank Theatre, The Lawler
25 Sep — 11 Oct