The NAC comes up trumps with carried away
carried away on the crest of a wave By David Yee, Directed by Kim Collier. An NAC English Theatre Production to April 1
Again and again, the stage of the NAC Theatre takes on an eerie beauty — one that is often not quite of this world yet stays anchored to a heartbreaking reality.
That reality is the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people in the area of the Indian ocean. A key thread running through David Yee’s compelling play — “carried away on the crest of a wave” — suggests not just aftershocks around the world but an existential crisis that occurred in the lives of those left behind to mourn the loss of those they cared about. It’s also about a loss of faith — in one key episode , a matter-of-fact Muslim engineer demolishes a Roman Catholic priest’s fervent belief that it was an act of God that saved his basilica and congregation from destruction. Mythology also surfaces: is it really pure fantasy to suggest, as one character does, that Planet Earth sits on the back of a turtle? …