Arguably the greatest satirical work ever written, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is being presented by TNT Britain at the revamped Salesian Theatre, Sliema, next week.
TNT dramatise each of Gulliver’s four journeys convinced that satire is only sharp if it is contemporary
Writer-director Paul Stebbings’s adaptation, which has been on an extensive world tour for the past three years, makes it clear that Swift’s caustic wit and sincere honesty have never been more relevant than the present.
The Gulliver saga starts when treated as a madman, Gulliver is forced to jump overboard by pirates from a ship and has to swim for days on end until he arrives in Lilliput, which is inhabited by small people.
He is recruited to help defeat the Brobdingnags, who are hated because they eat their eggs from the bottom, while in Lilliput they eat them from the top.
He escapes to Brobdingnag, where he is almost killed by a huge wasp for this is the land of the giant people. His adventures take him to Laputa, a land ruled by science and philosophy where people live on horoscopes and other superstitions. His next stop is among the disgusting Yahoos who are at war with the noble horse-humans.
In the final scene poor Gulliver is forced to re-enter the human world but is quite mad, convinced that horses are superior to humans.
Throughout the narrative, the Ringmaster tries to take the sting out of the satire, but at the end of the performance the actors rebel, and the Ringmaster is left helpless.
His story and Gulliver’s travels are over.
TNT Britain (known locally for the classical renderings of Hamlet, Macbeth, Oliver Twist at the Manoel, and lately Midsummer Night’s Dream at San Anton) ignore the juvenile approach usually rendered to this work by asking the mature questions that Swift was posing 300 years ago.
What is the moral basis of a government? What is the value of money? What is the aim of science? And when politicians behave like vicious animals why should they be valued higher than beasts?
TNT dramatise each of Gulliver’s four journeys, convinced that satire is only sharp if it is contemporary.
The company brings its unique brand of exciting total theatre coupled with spectacle and song, employing comedy, acrobatics, stilts, live music and razor-sharp dialogue to explore Swift’s masterpiece and our own collapsing world.
• Gulliver’s Travels is being staged at Salesian Theatre on November 8-10 at 8pm. Tickets and more information may be obtained on 2134 2516, or www.teatrusalesjan.com.