My Family and Other Animals (NHB Modern Plays)

Book excerpt: 'The sky turns the colour of a jay's eye. The sea turns a deep royal purple. The mist lifts in quick, lithe ribbons, like a conjuring trick. Before us lies the island...' It's 1935, and an eccentric English family - four children, their widowed mother, and Roger the dog - arrives on the sun-soaked shores of Corfu to start a new life. For eleven-year-old Gerry Durrell, the extraordinary landscape provides the perfect playground. Its exotic fauna inspires a life-long fascination with the animal kingdom - and his much-loved memoir My Family and Other Animals. Janys Chambers' acclaimed stage adaptation was first seen at York Theatre Royal, and invites other theatre companies to make ingenious and inventive decisions, bringing to life all the inhabitants of Durrell's cherished island - whether they walk and talk, fly and squawk, crawl or swim or slither.