My Family and Other Animals (NHB Modern Plays)

'The sky turns the colour of a jay's eye. The sea turns a deep royal purple. The mist lifts in quick, lithe ribbons, like a conjuring trick. Before us lies the island…'

It's 1935, and an eccentric English family – four children, their widowed mother, and Roger the dog – arrives on the sun-soaked shores of Corfu to start a new life.

For eleven-year-old Gerry Durrell, the extraordinary landscape provides the perfect playground. Its exotic fauna inspires a life-long fascination with the animal kingdom – and his much-loved memoir My Family and Other Animals.

Janys Chambers' acclaimed stage adaptation was first seen at York Theatre Royal, and invites other theatre companies to make ingenious and inventive decisions, bringing to life all the inhabitants of Durrell's cherished island – whether they walk and talk, fly and squawk, crawl or swim or slither.

'Simply a delight… The play's triumph is in the way it captures the exuberance of youth and the strangeness of the new culture that Gerald and his family find themselves in… it's there in Janys Chambers' adaptation, which keeps chunks of Durrell's evocative prose while adding some wonderfully funny embellishments' – The Stage

'Durrell gets the revival he deserves… it fairly fizzes with life' – Daily Mail

'Weaves the poetic, wide-eyed prose of Gerald Durrell's childhood memoir into a really charming and fun play' – Whatsonstage