Old Fitz Theatre, August 24
7/10
Is it a bird? Is it a play? Is it a play about birds? No, Birdsong of Tomorrow is not really a play, however much you squint through your binoculars. But it does spread its wings in a theatre and have theatrical plumage, so let’s not become too entangled in definitions. Let’s just celebrate Nathan Harrison’s absorbing writing and delivery.

The show is reminiscent of David Attenborough’s timeless The Life of Birds TV series. While Harrison may not be a celebrated naturalist, he is an ardent bird-watcher who also happens to be a theatre-maker, and he’s found a way to combine the two. It’s an hour-long monologue interweaving myriad information about birds – did you know they are dinosaurs, or that, while the world was young, birds first sang in Australia? – with snippets of his own life. All this he delivers with such artless charm, easy enthusiasm and gentle irony that you sit the under a spell such as Ariel might cast, and fall ever more in love with his subject.
I didn’t know crows can bear a grudge against a human for a decade, nor that they hold funerals for their own dead. I didn’t know that when lyrebirds were introduced to Tasmania, they brought with them the ability to mimic kookaburras (who aren’t native to the island), and then passed this down from generation to generation. Nor did I know that albatrosses can spend a year at sea without ever setting foot on land, and yet every two years return to the same spot to mate with a lifelong partner – just like some sailors!
Meanwhile we learn that in a past life, Harrison was in a punk band from which he fired his best friend, who later died, and, as a chick clings to the nest before flying for the first time, he’s scared to let go of his grief. It’s his only connection to his dead friend.

Theatrically, the show, directed by Emma McManus for Griffin Theatre (under its Griffin Lookout program, championing new practitioners) is appealingly lo-fi and analogue, other than for wafts of live music crafted by guitarist Tom Hogan. Images are displayed via slides and an overhead projector, and recordings of birdsong come via gramophone, reel-to-reel player or cassette player.
Maintaining this aesthetic, Harrison has opted for drawings and paintings rather than photographs of the birds he discusses. But when he talks about the extraordinary (now nearly extinct) New Zealand kakapo, for instance, the painting is rather ordinary, and the odd captivating photo would have been no great sin.
Woven ever so lightly through the monologue is the merest feather of philosophy: about time, change and permanence, and, without rubbing our beaks in it, a future in which the number of species dwindles by the day. Tomorrow I might be gazing at the sky and trees when I should be writing.
Until September 6.