Tsunami in the Royal Botanic Garden

Pericles and Children of the Sea on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Abstract

One of the hits of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005 was Children of the Sea, often characterized as a loose adaptation of Pericles, whose cast included orphaned Sri Lankan survivors of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. This essay explores the show's Fringe run in Edinburgh in relationship to notions of local and the foreign — specifically, how Fringe audiences and reviewers understood the production in relation to local and foreign and what the show's relationship to Shakespeare might have to do with these understandings.  Responses to Children of the Sea tend to intermingle the "magic" evoked by the show's outdoor location in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden with the power of the show's use of Sri Lankan culture as spectacle, treating what would seem to be the show's most local and what would seem to be its most foreign aspects as if they were inextricable. This essay proposes that the indistinguishability to reviewers of the power of the Scottish/Royal locale from the power of Sri Lankan culture and context has to do with Children of the Sea's unspecified relation to Shakespeare's text, Pericles — a text that itself seems to be both familiar — "local" — and foreign to the production's audience and reviewers.