FUP at Liverpool Everyman
Kristy Stott, Theatre Editor
Following the success of Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs) and The Tin Drum at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, we’re thrilled that Kneehigh return with their surreal and joyful retelling of FUP.
Kneehigh are a Cornwall based theatre company with a local, national and international profile. For over thirty years they have created vigorous, popular and challenging theatre, always performed with joyful anarchy.
Based on Jim Dodge’s international best-seller of the same name, FUP is a big-hearted story of family, love, loss and a feisty liquor-swigging duck. In this stage adaptation for Kneehigh, Simon Harvey shifts the action from Northern California to a weird and wild Cornwall.
The Santee family are unconventional, to say the least. One-hundred-year-old Grandaddy Jake and his enormous grandson Tiny live life on the fringes and while away the days drinking their home distilled Ol’ Death Whisper, building fences and boasting of immortality. Until one day – Fup arrives – an ass-kicking, whiskey-swilling, movie-loving mallard. And she is going to change their world forever.
Running at two hours with a twenty-minute interval, FUP features foot-stomping live music, quacking puppetry and Kneehigh’s signature eccentricity and charm. Aimed at adults and older children, those over the age of twelve, FUP is a quirky delight – a joyful and surreal reworking of an extraordinary cult novel.
