Sea Dance
Drama, 13+
Willie Cormack is a young lad, a gifted fiddler player and with an eye for the girls too maybe. He lives in a wild enough place right out at the end of a place called the Mullet – a peninsula, so on three sides of him there is the cold deep Atlantic. And what is it that he fears more than anything else?The ocean.
Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, but when his new friend – a sailor all the way from Morroco – is accused of assaulting a girl in the village, Willie finds he has to deal with his fears in a way that he had never imagined.
When I was living in Mayo, in Ireland, two stories haunted me. True stories, that is. One was an account of a terrible sea storm where all the young men, except for two brothers, who lived on a pair of islands off this coast were drowned when they were out fishing for salmon. The second was about something that had just happened before I moved into the area: a young sailor, an African – no one seemed sure which part of Africa he came from – was stranded out on the Mullet when his yacht ran aground during a heavy storm. Somehow those stories threaded together and Willie Cormack stepped out to meet me.