English Passenger

Pirates of the Caribbean meets Master & Commander Modern Period Limited Drama Series - 6 episodes. Novel adaptation of English Passengers - short-listed for the Booker Prize and Winner of the Whitbread Book Award 2000

An epic, historical sweep of a story with multi-stranded voices interweaving high comedy, rich dialogue and dramatic terror. It’s a rollicking, darkly funny tale of exploration and adventure with a profound portrait of colonial exploitation. The narrative thrust is told by Captain Quillian Kewley, a Manx smuggler hoping to offload his bounty in England and instead finds himself heading for Tasmania, propelled by the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson’s barmy notion to discover The Garden of Eden in Van Diemen’s Land. It’s the 1850’s and here the stories collide; we meet Peevay, our unique protagonist, a young half-blood Aboriginal man with a personal life-long quest for love, acceptance and belonging who tries to achieve cultural recognition but ultimately succumbs to the desire for revenge. It’s a thematically rich territory that explores cultural conflict, racial identity and tension between science and religion. It’s a history that is radically the here and now as it resonates with today's geopolitics.