The story of The Tears of Nerakhis
The story of The Tears of Nerakhis
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The musical production of The Tears of Nerakhis will be adapting an original novel written by Albert Suriñach, our creative director and founder of Studio Platero. Albert is a third-year Classics students at the University of St Andrews who has experience adapting his own novels to the stage, as in 2024 he produced and directed Dragon Fever at the Byre in St Andrews, an adaptation of his Spanish novel La fiebre del dragón. The novel, called "Las Lágrimas de Nerakhis" in Spain, is currently published in Spanish and is set to be published in English before the staging of the play.
The story
The story
The story tells the tragedy of an impossible love between a human and a divine creature. It takes place in a mythical world with two central deities: Nerakhis, god of nature, and his brother Reikwald, god of humanity. The protagonist, Calanthe, is a human girl who, frustrated with her mortality, rebels against the social conventions of her home castle. When she is forced to marry, she runs away and travels to find herself in the castle of the god Nerakhis. There she meets the daughter of the god of the night, Alea, a nymph of supernatural beauty imprisoned in the castle by her father to protect her from the world of men. Calanthe and Alea fall in love and escape, going on adventures that see them in the middle of a divine conflict between Chaos and Order.
There are many reasons why telling the story of ‘the Tears of Nerakhis’ is relevant to our modern world and the St Andrews student community. The novel is an adult fantasy where physical conflict is not the story’s catalyst and is portrayed as a futile resource. The central conflict pits nature against human beings, both on a metaphorical level with conflicts between gods, and on a psychological level through the mental evolution of the protagonist. Some of the themes explored in it are mortality, love, over-protectiveness and the destructive tendencies of humans towards nature. The fantastic elements in it have a mythological function and are found only with the appearance of divine or spiritual characters that represent the central themes addressed by the novel.
Watch our latest Behind-the-Scenes video, where our production team explains the story being adapted to the stage:
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