Belvoir St Theatre, July 30
10/10
That grief-knot in your heart – the one that won’t let you sleep – is not necessarily a clot of black, congealed blood. It might be evidence of Crow, and don’t assume he’s malignant. Despite his stabbing, tearing beak, taste for roadkill and breath to match, he actually does a nice line in therapy. If your wife happens to have died.
Like James Joyce’s Ulysses a century earlier, Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers revolutionised the possibilities of fiction. It flits between formats like a bird between branches in a tree: luminous one moment, dark the next, funny, effortlessly poetic and desperately moving.
It’s also perfect for a play.
Adapted by director Simon Phillips, set and lighting designer Nick Schlieper and actor Toby Schmitz, it’s the year’s superlative show so far, and among the half-dozen best I’ve ever seen. If this masthead awarded more stars than five, I’d give it a galaxy of them.
Dad (Schmitz) is crucified on a grief-wreathed cross by the sudden death of his wife, when he and his young Boys (Philip Lynch and Fraser Morrison) are visited by Crow (also Schmitz), a creature of impenetrable blackness who steers them towards a little crack of light.
The title’s drawn from Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the Thing with Feathers, and Crow swoops in from Ted Hughes’ collection of fantastical poems called Crow. (Dad is writing a book about Hughes within the story). Schmitz plays Crow as a bovver boy with a camouflaged kind streak, who still contemplates a spot of mischief – nothing serious: just a little eye-gouging – while ministering to these humans. He likes humans best when they’re grieving.
Schmitz is inspired. His Dad is a mess of inept fathering, holed heart, bewilderment, memories, stoicism and Hughes’ Crow. Schmitz wrings our hearts without ever overstepping, and then when his voice and body snap into Crow, he makes us laugh, as Crow must make Dad and the Boys laugh to save them not from grief, but from it becoming life-consuming.
So potent is Schmitz that Lynch and Morrison could easily have unbalanced the play with anything less than exceptional performances, but they, too, rise to this heightened state. When you see acting of this calibre, you understand that life is too extraordinary ever to be rendered in all its gory glory on a stage by pedestrian naturalism.
The text is largely unchanged from Porter’s book, which has a present-tense immediacy and inherent theatricality. Phillips and his team have enriched these qualities with striking black-and-white animations, courtesy of video designer Craig Wilkinson and illustrator Jon Weber, and via the wonder of music. Cellist Freya Schack-Arnott performs live her own score, which variously enunciates grief, the febrile workings of Crow’s tiny mind, the little joys of the Boys or echoes of their dead mother. If you miss this, you might peck yourself to death.
Until August 24.
https://www.andrewhenrypresents.com/grief-is-the-thing-with-feathers