A one-man play about Victor Hugo’s time writing his Bailiwick-based novel ‘The Toilers of the Sea’ is set to return to Guernsey later this year, to coincide with the 160th anniversary of the novel’s publication.
‘The Brainstorm’ stars Guernsey-born actor Patrick Dickson, best known for his role as Ian Routledge on Australian soap opera ‘Home and Away‘, who also wrote the play.
Dickson said that he hopes people will come away from his show a bit more excited by the French novelist.
He told Express: “I hope they get recharged if they’ve discovered him before – but very often people discover him for the first time.”
While people “might know ‘Les Miserables'”, many were unaware of Hugo’s “artwork, his personal life, his political life, his poetry, all those things, family life”.
“So, I just hope people come away with a little bit more curiosity about what he was really like.”
Despite being born in Guernsey, Dickson’s love for Victor Hugo was ignited after he emigrated down under in his late 20s.
“I was a long way away from home, living in Australia, and for some reason I picked up ‘The Toilers of the Sea’, which I’d never read – and probably never heard of before.”
“Even though I’d lived in Guernsey as a youth, and I picked it up and I struggled through it, and it was just about where I grew up, essentially.”
The actor, who has also appeared in 1980s period drama ‘Carson’s Law’, Australian drama ‘SeaChange’, and World War Two epic movie ‘A Bridge Too Far’, said he had no real choice in taking on the project.
“Why did I choose Victor Hugo? I think he chose me,” he told Express.
“So as a storyteller, which is what my job essentially is as an actor, I just thought, well, I want to share it one way or another.”
Dickson added: “The adventure of the story unfolds in you know the place that I loved, and that’s I guess it kind of made me realise how much I loved Guernsey and how much I miss it.”
‘Fantastic writer’
The play is being produced on behalf of the Victor Hugo Centre and sponsored by Cazenove Capital.
Laura Harrison, Operations Manager at the Victor Hugo Centre, said: “Not many people know about the octopus in the novel so we’re starting at quite a low bar here, but that’s great because that means there’s so much that we can tell, and there’s so many different stories.”
“There’s a really rich seam that there’s a lot of mining that we can do of it as we start to build towards the centre opening, which now we’ve got planning permission.
“We’re going into the schools to start to teach people about their literary heritage, and we really hope that we can start to move people towards understanding why Hugo is still relevant to modern day and what we can learn from this fantastic writer.”
‘The Brainstorm’ starring Patrick Dickson runs from 2 to 4 October at the Princess Royal Centre for Performing Arts, with tickets costing £20, or £12 for students and under 18s.
The shows start at 19:00 and last 1 hour and 40 minutes with no interval.
