TEATERi
After a cold journey a man arrives at a far off shore. He is alone in a world where the culture is new and the language incomprehensible. With no other possessions than a suitcase in his hand and a picture of the family he was forced to leave behind, he tries to start anew.
This tenderly told story is based on the award-winning artist Shaun Tan’s masterful graphic novel. Painting a colourful picture from utter despair through hardship to hope by using the language of music, movement and with literally a completely new vocabulary, The Arrival speaks to everyone.
Just as the story, the journey of the production started on either sides of a wide ocean and sprang to life through a dream that reached from one continent to another. As the director Thaddeus Phillips came across Shaun Tan’s The Arrival at a friend’s house in New York, USA, one of the artistic directors at Teateri, Christian Arin, picked up the same book in an apartment a few miles north of Stockholm, Sweden. Separately of each other they both decided that this was a story worth adapting to the stage. By chance their paths crossed when Christian Arin saw Thaddeus Phillips’ Red Eye to Havre de Grace off- Broadway and realised that Phillips was the artist he wanted to work with to bring Tan’s masterful story off the page and onto the stage. They teamed up with Lars Jansson and through his playful set design they have managed to achieve the visual creation they both aimed for. Now TEATERi would like to invite you along to continue this magical journey.