Big Telly excited over '˜Faerie Thorn'adaption

Big Telly is thrilled to announce that the company has started work on an adaptation of The Faerie Thorn by Ballymoney based writer Jane Talbot.

The productionis based on Talbot’s sensational new collection of dark tales set in the North Coast.

Zoe Seaton, Artistic Director of Portstewart-based Big Telly, said: ““We are unbelievably excited about this project. “What we’re drawn to as theatre makers isn’t just the brilliant and bewitching stories but the way Jane conjures up a whole world controlled by a complex fairy mafia including the memory-takers, the time winders, the bad talkers and the trolls – a world which is both scarily familiar and wickedly comedic.

“And then there’s the beautiful and evocative language – we see a fisherman’s wife ‘warm-hold her husband’s face’, we hear a baby’s cry that’s ‘full of all-on-my-ownness’, children who do not survive birth and called the ‘almost-but-not-quites’

“She does not tell us that Bright Blue and Daughter McCormick fell in love, but that they felt ‘the deep-root comfort of The Beautiful Belong-Together’.”

The Faerie Thorn will be devised with Jane Talbot, Zoe Seaton and a Northern Irish cast featuring Big Telly favourites: Shelley Atkinson (Melmoth, Gulliver, One Sandwich) and Patrick O’Reilly (One Sandwich, Gulliver, Puckoon) with music by Garth MacConaghie and mask work by John Wright.

As Big Telly celebrates its 30th year, this project is a timely match of content and context, with the company uniquely positioned as bold, risk taking theatre makers able to do justice to this extraordinarily universal and yet essentially local material.

The company is well known for producing successful and inventive literary adaptations – Melmoth the Wanderer, Gulliver, The Little Mermaid and Puckoon have all enjoyed critical and commercial success with remounts, national/international tours and extended runs at the Edinburgh Festival and in London’s West End.