Message in a Bottle, Peacock Theatre review ★★★★★

Message in a Bottle was poignantly topical when it opened to general acclaim in 2020, and it’s even more so now that the rhetoric surrounding migration is being pushed to extreme levels and is never far from the headlines.

The show eschews the rhetoric. Instead, it humanises ‘the issue' by narrowing the focus of its narrative to a family – parents and three offspring – forced by a brutal war to leave their hitherto simple, happy life in an unidentified country and seek refuge in unknown lands.

They pay human traffickers to get them onto a rickety boat to cross perilous seas. By the time they reach firm land, only three siblings remain, the parents lost on the way. They are held in a stark detention centre, before bribing their way out, and then have to find their way in a strange, often hostile land.

Sting reworked some of his back catalogue, and pop classics such as the titular Message in a Bottle, Roxanne and So Lonely have been re-recorded to produce a rich orchestral sounds, without losing their pop accents. As well as Sting himself, the guest vocalists include Beverley Knight, whose rendition of Fields of Gold is deeply affecting.

That Sting’s pre-existing lyrics have been assembled in such a way as to tell a coherent modern-day story is due to a large extent to Lolita Chakrabarti’s skilful dramaturgy, which offers a masterclass in how to shape a clear and effective narrative.

Clever set and video designs (Ben Stones and Andrzej Goulding respectively), and lighting by Natasha Chivers create atmospheric scenes: against a black-and-white video of stormy seas, the migrants’ overcrowded makeshift boat is shaped by the small bags containing their belongings, their tightly packed bodies encased in bright orange life-jackets violently swaying with the swell of the sea.

Message in a Bottle by Kate Prince/Sting. Photo: Helen Maybanks
The detention centre, with its sparse cells and abundant barbed wire, is stark; the brothel, where one of the brothers finally finds the young wife who’d been brutally taken from him by armed soldiers, all sconces and red lights.

At the centre of all this are the dancers of ZooNation, bringing their extraordinary skill, verve and energy to Kate Prince’s demanding narrative choreography. Through the multiple languages of hip-hop they tell the stories of their characters, so that you become truly invested in their fate: happy and sunny in their peaceful village, languidly romantic in the love duets, defiant in their detention cages.

The show ends on a positive note with all three siblings finding their own way in the new country; and this time round, too, the first night performance was met with a richly deserved standing ovation.