Have you ever wished to have the same auditory experience as a deer? Or maybe a cow? Now you can. Experimentalist director Katie Mitchell partners with playwright Nina Segal and sonic artist Melanie Wilson to explore the world from the eyes – or, more accurately, ears – of the titular animals. It’s a crude reproduction of a day in their lives that de-centres humans from its narrative altogether. Cow | Deer is entirely wordless, unique in its genre and unlike anything else you’ll see on a main stage. The card handed out before the start encourage the audience to close their eyes and relax while they listen to “moments of a summer day in England”. You could do that, but you’d be missing all the fun of seeing live foley artistry.
The production is made exclusively of sounds; not one word of explanation is uttered throughout. Pandora Colin, Tom Espiner, Tatenda Matavai, and Ruth Sullivan stand over a line of hay bales that act as a long table upon which a variety of items is manipulated to create noise. Tinsel and other man-made objects make appearances, but natural fibres, plants, and other biological substances run the show. Bok choi snap in two, water is poured, leaves are rustled, fruit gets mangled.
The soundscape is broader than what the foley artists do on stage, with the rumbling of engines, the buzzing of insects, and the bellowing of the herd being reproduced as sound design, so don’t expect any awkward mooing or other weird anthropomorphism. It all appears exceedingly accurate – even the birth of a new calf.
You could decide to follow the aforementioned instructions and imagine a deer frolicking in its field or a pregnant cow struggling in the industrial farm next door, but the real spectacle lies in the causation of the sounds, in the correlation between the action and the perfect imitation of a natural event. This enthralling collaboration generates the plot. Collective tapping is falling rain, gardening gloves are flapping wings, manipulating a bag of who-knows-what flawlessly mimics rumination. Bluntly said, it’s very cool.
This captivating hour-long experiment lets the spectator have full agency when it comes to its interpretation. The piece requires concentration: it’s easy to get lost with the lack of signposting, but it’s also quick to pick it back up and re-join the chain of events. It becomes increasingly evident that, when man intrudes into this idyll, tragedy strikes. However, though we destroy its balance, nature persists: after seconds of stunned silence when the animals cower, life resumes.
It’s certainly interesting that such a bold environmental message, one that is almost misanthropic in its intent, is ultimately expressed through an extremely human approach to theatrical storytelling. Cow | Deer makes you wonder the role of humanity and, perhaps, it will even make you a little bit kinder.
Cow | Deer runs at The Royal Court Theatre until 11 October.
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