“This pair of Chicago-based 30-year-olds can lay claim to a special talent for alternative performance-making of disarmingly odd, cosmic charm.” The Times

After the critical acclaim on their previous visits, the Chicago based collaborative performance duo Cupola Bobber are set to make a welcome return to the UK with their latest production, the ridiculously sublime adventure, Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me.

Infused with gentle humour and melba-dry wit, delightfully low-tech invention, and expansive imagination, Cupola Bobber create a vast internal adventure of miniscule proportions as, Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me studies the action of the Sea, both as mythology and as presence, and asks: why is it people are drawn to the Sea?

Performing the destructive magnetism of The Sea using Cupola Bobber’s home-spun minimal aesthetic and poker-faced absurdist charm, whilst channelling both Laurel and Hardy and Gilbert & George, the show builds a remarkably engaging exploration of how the Sea functions as a dwarfing muse of existential contemplation, a place of leisure, and as heartless destroyer. All this is explored through the locations of British Edwardian sea-side resorts and surrounding “work towns”, the disappeared sea-side town of Hallsands, the disappearing town of Dunwich, and 1930’s dust bowl Kansas. Lancaster.

Much of the play’s themes were inspired by the company’s UK-based research. From the project’s starting source, WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, a meandering account of a walk through Suffolk, and throughout the performance’s genesis, the role of the Sea in the history of British culture offered profound insight into the mythology of the sea. Of special interest was the evolution of sea-side resorts, especially those whose heydays coincided with the industrial invention of leisure.

For the new play the duo spent two days walking from Morecambe to Blackpool, discovering in Cleveley’s many many parked sea-facing cars, each with one or two people inside. This reminded them of a Sebald quote, “I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass.” They played the OK Corral Shoot-Out arcade game on the pier in Blackpool, they rode the temporary big wheel in Morecambe. They visited the Stan Laurel museum in Ulverston, and stayed at the Stan Laurel pub.

They walked across Morecambe Bay with the official Queen’s Guide to the Sands and heard stories about how many things had sunk into that sand over the decades… mail, luggage, people, horses, carts, cars, shoes. They checked out all the Morecambe and Wise books from the Morecambe library. They bought all their DVD’s. They laughed really hard at them. They read all the books in the Lancaster University’s library that mentioned Gilbert and George. They watched the films of Mitchell and Kenyon. They watched the Laurel and Hardy film Way Out West.

Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me is co-produced by the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster.

Click here to read the Cupola Bobber interview with Whats On Stage

This performance will be followed by a Q&A.