SAGA (play)

SAGA is a play written and directed by Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock, performed by Wakka Wakka Productions in collaboration with Nordland Visual Theatre. According to Wakka Wakka's website, SAGA features 30 puppets, ranging from 3 inches to 10 feet, portrayed by an international cast of puppeteers from Iceland, Norway, Ireland, and the US'.

The play uses puppets, the puppeteers wearing masks throughout the play to make them look like Icelandic horses. It makes extensive use of recorded sound, along with sound effects produced by the puppeteers themselves, and quasi-cinematic effects like bullet time. There is some use of a diorama of the farm where the play is set, on which the movements of cars to the farm are performed. The play is in English spoken with Icelandic accents. It lasts for about an hour.

The play opens with the puppeteers performing a slow, sinister dance to bagpipe music evoking medieval music, looming over the character who turns out to be the protagonist of the play, Gunnar Oddmundsson. The play then cuts to a scene of Gunnar and his son Óli digging a hole for an outdoor jacuzzi. The scene is rural Iceland and Gunnar and Óli wear lopapeysur. Gunnar's wife Helga emerges and it becomes clear (partly through this scene and partly later in the play) that Ólafur is preparing the jacuzzi as part of a scheme to open the 'Viking Bed and Breakfast', tourist accommodation at which Helga is to run a restaurant and Gunnar to run horse and jeep tours. Their conversation is interrupted by the sudden appearance of Geir Haarde making his 'God bless Iceland' speech of October 6, 2008, breaking the news of the unfolding 2008–11 Icelandic financial crisis. Gunnar soon finds himself beset with bills he can no longer pay (literally: they flock around his head, held by the puppeteers). A flashforward shows Gunnar looking in on himself unconscious in a jeep that has crashed into the unfinished jacuzzi and telling himself to wake up. Meanwhile, flashbacks recount his earlier conversations with his friend at the bank, who glibly encouraged him to sell his fishing boat and fish-quota, invest the proceeds rather than pay off his mortgage, and to take out loans to buy his way into an idyllic pastoral life, purchasing land, a new house, a jeep, horses, and funding Gunnar's putative tourism business. The series of loans in these flashbacks are portrayed as being taken out with a growing tone of frivolity and derangement on the part of both Gunnar and the banker, with Gunnar coming to sign his name as 'Michael Jackson' and 'Elvis Presley' on loan documents, followed by a dance routine. Gunnar is also portrayed in a flashback horse-racing with his son.

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Wikipedia