Sea Witch ★★

The show begins with an LAPD-style light cannon beamed directly at the audience, which was in a way a nice indicator of what is to come: a barrage of thoughtless maximalism bordering on, or in fact willingly traipsing into the absurd.

The thing about Sea Witch is that it is an adaptation from a medium which is already on the verge of cultural bankruptcy. The Young Adult Fantasy Novel is a genre so oversaturated, so repetitive and ouroborically self-consuming, it is actually difficult to distinguish parody from the genuine article. Sea Witch, the novel, is in fact the genuine article, and hence the stage adaptation is cursed to suffer the crucial ailment of the genre: a complete lack of originality. On its surface a dark retelling of the backstory of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the show reads as a beat-by-beat plot-point checklist, where conflict manifests moment to moment by the random arrival of events such as “the Royal Games” wherein the two male leads must suddenly and inexplicably fight for the crown. Or for the girl? Or maybe for something else? It was unclear.

What was clear is that this is a bid to make the next Wicked: a previously unexplored shadowy villain is thrust into the redemptive limelight to the delight of soft-hearted audiences everywhere. Unfortunately, this is not Wicked. It will never be Wicked. But what could it be?

There was a point around the halfway mark where the cast almost started to lean into the comedy, deliberately overegging the melodramatic quality of the dialogue and drama – eliciting genuine laughs from the crowd. They soon pulled back, returning to their default, self-serious, semi-tragic locutions, but it did give a sense of something so-bad-it’s-good lurking beneath the surface.