Theatre feels like the perfect home for the wild and poetic Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Max Porter’s slim book – a cross between a novella and a tone poem. The book lives in the space between reality and imagination where, after the death of his wife, a Ted Hughes scholar and his two young sons are visited by a giant talking crow.
This is a space that theatre, with its suspension of disbelief and gestural staging and imagery (where a box can become a chair, a bed, or a mountain), inherently understands. We make our feelings into symbols and stories so we can process them, and we’ve been doing it for centuries on stage.
Porter’s book, published in 2015, has been adapted for live performance at least seven times (with more in the pipeline). This year, it’s Belvoir’s turn to take the man, his boys, and their crow and show an audience how digging into the guts of feeling can cut a path through.
It’s a team that’s no stranger to ghosts, the gothic, or theatricalising literature. The co-adapters are director Simon Phillips (Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour’s Phantom of the Opera) and lighting designer Nick Schlieper (Sydney Theatre Company’s Dracula), who both co-designed the set, and Toby Schmitz (Netflix’s Boy Swallows Universe), who plays Dad and Crow.
Onstage in a corner is Freya Schack-Arnott, the show’s composer, playing a mournful cello that seems to haunt Dad specifically. Sound designer Daniel Herten conjures a murmur of fluttering wings whenever Schmitz slips on his leather jacket to become Crow, playing with unseen presences.
It’s a straightforward production, largely following the book’s triptych of short prose poems in the alternating perspectives of Dad, Boys (played here by adult actors Philip Lynch and Fraser Morrison) and Crow.
When Dad has the floor, we stay grounded in realism – he grapples with raw emotions and haunting memories alongside the day-to-day of loss, somehow putting one foot in front of the other when his life is shattered. He worries about his sons; he becomes “odd”. He conjures this feathered analyst-cum-babysitter-cum-trickster from his research into Hughes’ 1970 poem cycle Crow – or perhaps Crow tastes the family’s grief and flies from poetry to their side. Either option feels – as it does in the book – surreal but strangely correct.
Inhabiting the lost Dad, Schmitz makes a great effort to access tenderness and let his language be lovely; it’s part-performance, part-oration. It doesn’t always work but Porter’s words have power – throughout the show, there is a constant audience murmur of sniffles and sobs.
As Crow, Schmitz finds more avian postures – such as a tilt of the head, delivering his spray of his words like pokes from a beak. Schlieper’s moody lights seem to bend around Crow; he casts shadows that are, depending on the scene, a threat or an embrace.
Flitting around the edges of the stage before swooping to its centre in a rush of energy are the Boys (in beautiful performances – Lynch is remarkably poignant as the youngest child), whose stories shift from accounts of childhood adventures to tales of mythic metaphor, as they try to reassemble themselves and grow up into their changed world.
There is great permission in this production, as in the book, for each audience member to give grief the shape and space it needs, and on opening night as people near me wept, and as rain hammered down on the roof, it was almost transporting: we almost fell into Crow’s world.
But this is a straightforward adaptation, in script and staging, and that keeps us grounded in our own world. Phillips and Schlieper have constructed a world of black and grey: stones at the door, feathers that fall through the air and coat the space. It’s all backdropped by animated illustrations (by Jon Weber, with video design by Craig Wilkinson), also predominantly in black and greys. These illustrations literalise the scenes: there’s the metaphoric forest in which the boys confront an aspect of their grief; there’s Crow, watching; there’s a flashback scene.
There’s something flattened and lost in this approach: by taking the book’s sacred imaginative space – where a reader, spurred to new ideas, conjures up their own images – and turning it into something literal, the production feels too prescriptive, too safe.
It’s a missed opportunity: in the theatre, a blank black box can light up brains and unlock stores of wonder as we build new realities; here, we’re directed to see everything, even Crow, the exact same way. For some, this will work. For others, it could feel like being held at arm’s length from the mess and guts the book invited us to drown in until we could climb our way out.
Grief is the Thing With Feathers is at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, until 24 August
