Day fifteen: Icarus 2.0

One of my favorites. I can't get over how endearing the whole thing was (definitely not to be confused with cutesy). I say endearing mostly because the guy playing the child was so convincing as a young boy, even though he's probably twenty-four. And also because the relationship between the boy and the father was sweet and needy, and entirely convincing.

The story, as you might have guessed, is inspired by the Greek myth about Icarus: his father makes him wax wings, but he flies too close to the sun (can't not think about Buster when I say that), so they melt and he falls into the sea. In Icarus 2.0, a father and son, Icarus, live in a flat in London. The father never leaves, and Icarus only leaves to get food for them. The father has been working on training the boy to fly, since the day he left his wife and took the child with him. I'm not sure what age the boy is supposed to be, but they make it evident that he is more dependent on his father than he should be.

I said the story is endearing, but I don't necessarily mean that it is light-hearted. They employ a lot of symbolism that nods to the myth, but fits into the modern day. For example, the father keeps listening to recordings of pilots communicating with ground control. As the project to get Icarus to fly seems less and less possible, the father begins to realize his mistake in keeping Icarus from the real world as he grows up. Simultaneously, the recordings he listens to become more frightening. Finally, after the father tricks Icarus into leaving (for his own good), the recording is of the final minute of a plane crash.

And in Icarus 2.0, the father had set up a large ball of string attached to a table in the flat, so Icarus could carry the end of the string whenever he went out to get food, and then find his way back without trouble. And something I just read (thanks Wikipedia) about the myth of Icarus is that his father, Daedalus, was the one who gave Theseus the string to help him find his way back out of the labyrinth (in the myth about killing the minotaur). Clever reference!

Anyway, I enjoyed it the whole time, which makes it a solid show, in my opinion.