by The theater feels like the perfect home for the wild and poetic grief is the thing with feathers, Max Porters slim book – a cross between a novella and a sound poem. The book lives in the room between reality and imagination, where after the death of his wife, a Ted Hughes scholar and his two young sons are visited by a huge speaking crow.
This is a space in which the theater understands its abolition of unbelief and gestures staging and pictures (where a box can become a chair, a bed or a mountain) naturally. We make our feelings into symbols and stories so that we can process them and we have been doing it on stage for centuries.
Porter’s book, which was published in 2015, was adapted for live appearances at least seven times (with more in the pipeline). This year, Belvoir is to take the man, boy and her crow and show an audience how a ditch can cut through the courage of the feeling.
It is a team that is no stranger to ghosts who is not a stranger. The co-adapter are director Simon Phillips (Handa Opera on the Phantom of the Opera by Sydney Harbor) and the light designer Nick Schlieper (Dracula of the Sydney Theater Company), who both plays the set and Toby Schmitz (Netflix ‘Boys Universe), who plays dad and crow.
On the stage in a corner is Freya Schack-Arnott, the composer of the show, who plays a sad cello, seems to be pursuing dad. The sound designer Daniel Herten conjures up a murmur of fluttering wings when Schmitz slips onto his leather jacket to crow with invisible presence.
It is an uncomplicated production that largely follows the triptych of the short prose poems of the book in the alternating perspectives of DAD, boys (here by adult actors Philip Lynch and Fraser Morrison) and Crow.
When dad has the ground, we remain ground in realism-with raw emotions and urgent memories together with the everyday life of the loss and somehow puts a foot in front of the other when his life is broken. He is worried about his sons; He becomes “strange”. He conjures up this feathered analyst babysitter trickster from his research on Hughes’ poetry cycle from 1970 or maybe Crow tastes the grief of the family and flies from the poetry to her side. Each option – as in the book – feels surreal, but strangely correct.
Schmitz lives in the lost father and tries great effort to gain access to tenderness and make his language beautiful. It is partial performance, division. It doesn’t always work, but Porter’s words have power – throughout the show there is a constant audience that murmurs of sniffing and sobs.
As a crow, Schmitz finds more bird posture – like a tendency of the head that delivers his spray of his words like Pokes from a beak. Schliepers atmospheric lights seem to be for crow; He throws shadows that are depending on the scene, a threat or a hug.
The boys are the boys (in beautiful appearances – Lynch is as the youngest child, whose stories about the adventures of childhood to change stories about the mythical metaphor and allow themselves to grow into their changed world in order to grow from reports about the changed world to the center of the stage.
In this production there is a great permit, as in the book, so that every audience grief gives the form and the space it needs, and on the opening evening when people cried near me, and when rain hammered on the roof, it almost transported: We almost fell into crows world.
However, this is a simple adaptation in the script and staging, and that keeps us founded in our own world. Phillips and Schliepers have built a world of black and gray: stones on the door, feathers that fall through the air and coat the room. Everything is returned by animated illustrations (by Jon Weber, with video design by Craig Wilkinson), also mainly in black and gray tones. These illustrations are the scenes literally: there is the metaphorical forest in which the young confront an aspect of their grief; It is crow, observed; There is a flashback scene.
In this approach, a bit flattened and lost: by the holy imaginative space of the book – in which a reader turns new ideas, conjures up her own pictures – and turns it into something literally.
It is a missed opportunity: in the theater, an empty black box can light up brain and unlock shops while building new realities. Here we are instructed to see everything, even crow, exactly the same. This will work for some. For others it could feel like the book was held on my arm length and invited the book to drown until we could climb outside.
