HUMANITY has had an inherent fascination with the sky since the beginning of time. 

Myths and legends regarding the sun, the moon and the stars are prevalent in every society and religion, from stories about the constellations to people ascending into the heavens in fanfare.

This seemingly intrinsic weave of folk-tales and enchantment is something The Human Zoo are attempting to tap into in The Girl Who Fell in Love with the Moon, which is being performed as part of the Brighton Fringe.

The production comes to the fringe as part of the festival’s industry expert selected WINDOW programme following a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer. 

“We started with listening to loads of music, we realised that loads of lyrics and loads of our language and poetry refers to sky as a romantic way of talking about things,” says Florence O’Mahony, who plays the titular girl, aptly named Luna.

“Whether it is ambition, love, family, you just notice these quite cheesy phrases like ‘I love you to the moon and back’ or ‘reach for the sky’.

“We were thinking about how humanity always aims at what it cannot reach and the concept just came from there.”

The scene for this is set as a group of rag-tag performers, appropriately on their way to an arts festival, become stranded in a forest when their car breaks down. 

Their only entertainment being one another as the show takes shape into five stories told under the light of the moon.

“I think we inherently need stories to tell,” says O’Mahony. “As humans our imagination and creativity is one our defining features and lies at the soul of every single person.

“There is this sense that I can tell a story about the sun because I am never going to have to touch it, never have to check with the sun that this is okay.

“There is a sense of ownership over those sort of stories were people cannot challenge them as they are so mystical.

“It feels like an age-old thing that people have passed on stories about the sky to try and make sense of something which is unfathomable.

“As people we tell stories to help us make sense of morality, of life, of love and all those sorts of things.”

When the show was played in Edinburgh, the troupe in the show were heading to Edinburgh, and now on its way to Brighton, the troupe both in reality and in the show will be on their way to Brighton. 

There is clowning meshed with music, meshed with poetry, meshed with the theatre and the audience will be immersed in this visually imaginative dark fairytale which has been touted as ‘Tim Burton-esque’. 

O’Mahony says the light and comedic tone is something which spawned naturally out of something which started out being a deeply serious piece.

“The more we tried to add this great integrity and sense of wonderment, which it does have, the sillier it became,” she says. “We now have a slightly absurd comedy which has peppered moments within it talking about humanity, but we have this troupe of performers who are a little bonkers but represent a little of someone in each of them.

“We started out by adapting songs we heard on the radio. Current pop songs, with lyrics about the skies, stars, suns and moons, and we developed our characters and stories for there.”

When asked what songs provided the basis, O’Mahony sings “why you wanna go put stars in their eyes” from Just Jack, and adds they also used Coldplay’s Sky Full of Stars and Billy Bragg’s A New England, saying “it felt like a really good way of getting into the storytelling”.

But from these pop songs the performers created their own score for the production, which developed alongside, and aforementioned ‘Tim Burton-esque’, distinctive visual style. 

“Perhaps it is a little bit of a crude comparison”, O’Mahony says. “We have used it in marketing in more than actually pinning it down.

“But we do find there is a big cross section of people who really like Tim Burton will really like this, because it is storytelling for grown-ups. “

She goes on: “It is a really playful, really visually, sometimes really silly storytelling where ridiculous things happen, it is a patchwork of a different forms, but it hopefully brought together in a coherent way.”

Friday, May 13, and Saturday, May 14.
6.45pm, tickets £8, call 01273 917272.