A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings – Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival 2024

Dan Colley & Riverbank Arts Centre

Based on the short story by

Gabriel García Márquez

Adapted for the stage by Dan Colley, Manus Halligan and Genevieve Hulme-Beaman

Director

Dan Colley

Cast

Genevieve Hulme-Beaman

Manus Halligan

Set and Props Designer

Andrew Clancy

Lighting Designer

Sarah Jane Shiels

Composer and Sound Designer

Alma Kelliher

Dan Colley is a multi-annual artist-in-residence at Riverbank Arts Centre since 2019, funded by The Arts Council and Kildare County Council, which has supported the development of A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings and two other new works by Dan Colley and collaborators.

For more about Dan Colley’s work see dancolley.com

Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre

15—17 March 2024

Costume Designer

Dan Colley

AV Designer

Eoin Kilkenny

Chief LX

Suzie Cummins

Production Photography

Ste Murray

Stage Manager

Evie McGuinness

Production Manager

Eoin Kilkenny

Producer

Matthew Smyth

A Note from the Director

Gabriel Garcia Márquez was born and raised in Colombia, near the Caribbean coast, in a time of violent political turbulence in the country. When he was asked about the label “magic-realism” that his work is given, and how he’s often praised for the “imagination” in his writing, he said that he finds it amusing because he never thought he was writing imaginatively – he said he was writing about Caribbean reality. Sometimes the reality we observe is more magical than the fantasies we invent.

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

is called “a tale for children” but it’s a story that relentlessly resists a reader’s efforts to extract a moral lesson from it—unlike in the stories by some of the giants of the genre such as Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde and the Brothers Grimm—marvelous writers though they are. It’s much more murky, emotionally complex and ambiguous than those tales.

This is a story where we are asked to hold multiple contradictory ideas in our minds at the same time. What are we to think of Pelayo and Elisenda, whose casual cruelty towards the old man might appall us, but who also demonstrate deep parental tenderness? Should we feel pity for the man or fear him, knowing that it’s possible that he could take a child away? We are asked to embrace the ambiguity, like the doctor who

examines him and says “It seems impossible for him to be alive...and yet, the logic of his wings! Now that I see them I can’t understand why other men don’t have them too.”

“This is a story where we are asked to hold multiple contradictory ideas . . .”

It is in that ambiguous space, in the grey area between black-and-white certainties, that the conditions for magic are ripe. Because magic does exist. Also it doesn’t. These are also the ideal conditions for theatre to exist. In theatre, we’re invited to suspend our disbelief, to play the game of theatre, while knowing that it is an artifice. These contradictions, this blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, is also the child’s reality. The world, as children encounter it for the first time, is full of the bizarre but true, and the banal but false. And often there isn’t a very good reason for what divides them.

It may be “a tale for children” but it has as much in it for those who are no longer children, as it does for those who are currently. Our hope is to create a piece of theatre where children and adults can spend time together in that ambiguous, strange and thrillingly dark psychic space—in that Caribbean reality.