Malta

Hayle

Cyprus

You are minding your own business. Suddenly a man with enormous wings crashes to earth beside you. Good luck or bad? Angel or demon? All you know is your life, and the life of everybody you know, will never be the same…ever again!

When we started working on the Three Islands Project we needed to find a vehicle that would work in all three locations. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is a very simple story that deals with profound issues of communities affected by change, and the metaphor of the sea bringing and taking away. This highlighted the commonalities between Malta, Cyprus and Cornwall and presented the possibility of adapting the story to the individual locations.

The intention was to represent a working community, a ready-made world that is self-sustaining, and to explore how an unexpected arrival changes that.  A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is a magical realist text, where different rules prevail. The village of Mahal-le materialises in different locations, Vittoriosa, Nicosia, Hayle. It is not a representation of those places. It is itself. But it may be that the challenges faced by Mahal-le when a decrepit old birdman crash-lands in its midst might appear somewhat familiar…

Every place makes its own special demands. In Malta we were near water, we needed to find boats and people to work them, We were introduced to local people willing to help us , they become part of the production and the team grew. By these chance encounters meaning is added to the production.

The production opened in Birgu, Malta, in September 2003, with a stunning view across the Grand Harbour to Valetta. The whole town turned out to watch the event, witnessing local people abseiling down the town’s 60ft sheer walls, speed boats racing across the water and an ‘angel’ flying 300ft over the grand harbour.

In Cyprus in 2004 we had to get permission from the UN to build our village,  We needed to place it on the Green Line, the buffer zone between the two separated halves of the island. We found  a wonderful mix of Turkish and Greek Cypriot theatre makers and, amazingly, we also managed to get permission to allow the two halves of the island to come together to form the audience. Our village was set in a derelict tavern that had been closed down because of sniper fire.
Every night we brought it back to life with songs, dances and poignant emotion.

The strongest memory of making this show was in a rehearsal. Derman, a Turkish Cypriot performer began teaching his dance to the company. The Greek Cypriot girls immediately joined him, with tears in their eyes, saying: ‘This is my dance. This is the dance we do in my village’. We had been told that the two cultures have been separated for 26 years. We had a glimpse of what that meant and this is perhaps what this work does best – it leaps across boundaries of nationality, culture, language, prejudice and history.

The third stage of ‘A Very Old Man…’brought us home to Cornwall, to the South Quay in Hayle, a Cinderella town, once famous for its heavy engineering, now outshone by its more prosperous and glamorous sister, St Ives. We worked with the fishermen, the harbourmasters, local schools and young volunteers. Every night for three weeks an angel flew high over Hayle, and the people of the town came out of their houses to watch.

On a multitude of levels A Very Old Man is an extraordinary piece of work. In terms of the regenerative effect of a piece of work on a depressed community, the social cohesion that this might inspire, the civic pride in hosting work of this quality and (most importantly in my view) in terms of the artistic quality of the work itself this is an exemplary achievement.
David Micklem, Theatre Officer, Arts Council England
The Three Islands Project was a transnational theatrical collaboration between Kneehigh Theatre Company, Cornwall, UK; WILDWORKS, Cornwall UK; St James Centre for Creativity, Malta and the Cyprus Theatre Organisation. The project, a landscape production inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, had three stages: Malta in 2003, Cyprus in 2004 and Cornwall in 2005; one of the outcomes of the project as a whole has been the emergence of a new Cornwall based company, WILDWORKS, created by Kneehigh's former artistic director, Bill Mitchell, especially to develop work outside conventional theatre spaces.