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The story of two novice seafarers, ‘The Unknown Island’ feels like a fitting choice for Ellen McDougall’s first show in charge of the Gate Theatre. It’s an adaptation of an enigmatic fairytale by Portuguese writer José Saramago. And it’s a lovely, self-contained thing: perfectly suited to this small studio space; long and thin like the deck of a ship.
A man asks the king for a boat. Rather surprisingly, he actually gets one. With the palace’s runaway cleaning woman in tow, he embarks on an uncertain quest to find ‘The Unknown Island’ – and to be the first to set foot on it. A four-strong cast tell the story of the pair’s relationship, cleaving tightly to Saramago’s original, alternating and harmonising like a chorus. Rosie Elnile’s set design reflects the endless sea and sky they discover by coating the room in blue tarpaulin, highlighted with pleasantly jarring notes of red.
It’s a richly metaphorical story that – of course – isn’t really about sailing. It’s about telling stories. Or it’s about love. Or it’s about wanting something, wildly, desperately, then realising once you’ve got it that it’s just the beginning. And that maybe you don’t even want it at all. The story’s power comes from this swirling sea of images and gnomic truths, ready for each traveller to find their own meaning in.
In McDougall’s hands, it has a real magic, its gentle momentum temporarily upturned by a breezy, brilliantly weird postmodern dream sequence that fills the stage with nodding balloon animals. It makes something that feels a bit unfashionable – the sort of magical realist fairytale of the genre that was wildly popular in the ’80s and ’90s – feel modern and new. And its images and words come back to you, later, like driftwood coming to the shore.