Curious Directive Announces Full Casting For FROGMAN at Edinburgh Festival

Full casting has been announced on curious directive's Frogman which opens at the Traverse Theatre, Codebase, as part of the Edinburgh Festival. A hugely ambitious, coming-of-age thriller, Frogman is told through live theatre and 360 film in Virtual Reality.

The show will open in Edinburgh before embarking on an 8-date UK tour to Brighton, Plymouth, Cambridge, Oxford, Bath, Warwick, Norwich, and Hull with further dates to be announced.

Tessa Parr plays Meera and will be performing live on stage. The cast also includes voice work from Sarah Woodward as DCI Fiona Webb, Johnny Flynn as Douglas Clarke, Anna Procter as Cathy Selbourne, Kate Shenton as Jen Philips and Russell Woodhead as Ryan Willis.

The VR cast features four non-professional young actors from schools in Brisbane, Australia. They are Ava Ryan (aged 11) as Young Meera, Indiah Morris (11) as Lily McCullen, Sol Castanho (11) as Shaun Jacobs and Milla Webb (13) as Ashleigh Richardson.

The Great Barrier Reef, 1995.

Meera is eleven. It's her first sleepover. Strawberry Dunkaroos, Sega Mega Drive and coral fragment analysis descends into torch-lit storytelling from sleeping bags.

Lights off. In the corner, Meera's aquarium is beginning to glow. Outside over the reef, the Frogman hovers looking for the traces of a missing child. The annual corAl Bloom is due, creating an underwater snowstorm. Time is running out.

Frogman is a multi-sensory show which submerges the audience deep into the Great Barrier Reef and carefree summers of long ago. Blending youthful nostalgia with a dark sense of haunting unease, the show captures that yearning to return to purer days, real or imagined and the pain at the realisation that those days are gone forever. Nothing can ever be the same again.

Fusing live theatre with 360 film, Frogman blurs the lines between reality and fiction, the physical and the virtual. It will be performed to an audience of 30, who will each be given a VR headset to experience new ways into storytelling in a theatre environment.

Directed by Artistic Director and Founder Jack Lowe, the show has been three years in the making and Lowe has worked alongside specialists in marine biology from Hull's Deep Aquarium, coral reef scientist Jamie Craggs (Horniman Museum), Sebastian Hennige (Heriot-Watt) and Creative Technologist Ed Greig (Deloitte Digital)

Jack has assembled an exceptional team including Linbury Prize winning designer Camilla Clarke and Tony award-winning sound designer Peter Malkin (The Encounter).

The creation of Frogman has included underwater film shoots in Australia and Indonesia and was made in close collaboration with schools from Hull and Backbone Youth Arts, Brisbane, a leading Australian experimental youth theatre. Together they have created the show exploring themes of childhood, parenthood and the impending coral reef bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.

Founded in 2008, a Norwich-based company, curious directive is widely recognised for risk taking and genre-pushing theatre. The company are double Fringe First winners and their previous work includes Pioneer, The Kindness of Strangers, After the Rainfall, Olfactory, Binary, Exoplanets and Your Last Breath.

4 to 27th August 2017

Traverse Theatre (CodeBase) Edinburgh

Tickets: 0131 228 1404

Online: www.traverse.co.uk

5 to 9 September 2017

The Old Market Brighton

Tickets: 01273 201 801

Online: www.theoldmarket.com

19 to 23 September 2017

Theatre Royal Plymouth
Tickets: 01752 267222

Online: www.theatreroyal.com

27 to 29 September 2017

Cambridge Junction, Cambridge
Tickets: 01223 511 511

Online: www.junction.co.uk

2 to 6 October 207

Oxford Playhouse

Tickets: 01865 305305

Online: www.oxfordplayhouse.com

7 to 11 October 2017

The Egg, Bath

Tickets: 01225 823409

www.theatreroyal.org.uk

16 to 19 October 2017

Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick

Tickets: 024 7652 4524

Online: www.warwickartscentre.co.uk

22 to 29 October 2017

Norwich Arts Centre

Tickets: 01603 6603352

Online: www.norwichartscentre.co.uk

1 to 11 November 2017

Hull UK City of Culture 2017 - venue to be announced

Online: www.hull2017.co.uk

Further dates to be announced.