4 hours ago
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Down the road from the Royal Court, a building is adorned with the bust of a cow – a reminder that this area of London was once home to grazing dairy cattle and has history as farmland. Cow | Deer, an hour-long “experiment in performance”, co-created by director Katie Mitchell, writer Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, is a sort of theatrical rewilding as the Upstairs stage is given over to a summer’s day in the life of a heavily pregnant cow and a young roe deer.
Past productions at the Court have featured live animals, including half a dozen goats (eponymous stars of Liwaa Yazji’s play) and a scene-stealing goose (in Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman). Here, the pair’s presence is instead painstakingly felt through myriad foley sound effects and field recordings. Standing at hay-bale desks, a cast of four – Pandora Colin, Tom Espiner, Tatenda Matsvai and Ruth Sullivan – get to work making noises with natural materials and manmade objects: gravel and tinsel, raffia and rope, a hot water bottle and a watering can. Plants and herbs are ground up throughout, their scent slowly filling the room.
As in Mitchell and Wilson’s version of Rebecca Watson’s Little Scratch (a human’s day in the life), there is often a comical sense of cause and effect in the ingenuity on display. The birth of a calf is done with a balloon, pak choi and handcream. But all of these identifiable ingredients are transformed into something far greater in a stunning sound design and, like the best puppeteers, these performers bring huge empathy for the lives they convey. Espiner’s expressions alone, during the birthing scene, are extraordinary.
This co-production with the National Theatre of Greece is described as a listening experience and you are invited to close your eyes and relax if you so choose but I found that diluted it. Watching the quartet, who at times affect animal-like movements (fists become hooves, a mop is swished like a tail), you adopt not just their shared sense of concentration in the act of creation but also an alertness akin to the animals’ own vigilance.
That’s necessary because you need to work hard to keep up. It takes a while for the play’s magic to take hold. You adjust to a landscape where everything and nothing is happening at once, and to a plot with its own dramatic tension and matters of life and death, but only the most subdued murmur of language. I craved a little more signposting along the way. This animal’s-eye-view never shifts your perspective with quite the moxie of Tim Crouch’s talking dog in Toto Kerblammo! but it is exquisitely evocative, bolstered by the inventive angles of Prema Mehta’s lighting and Alex Eales’ thicket-like design.
More than 10 years have passed since Mitchell directed the scientific lecture 2071 here, calling for collective action against climate catastrophe. Terrifyingly little has been achieved since. That production sounded the alarm with facts and figures. Cow | Deer, with its sinister roars of transport representing human incursions on the natural world, is far more emotive for placing us in earshot of a fragile ecosystem. And the calf’s birth could be the most captivating stage scene of the year.
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At the Royal Court, London, until 11 October
