Sydney Reviews

That peon to Ted Hughes’ CROW, Max Porter’s compact tone poem, Grief is the Thing With Feathers, has been adapted and thrillingly brought to theatrical life by the talented trio of actor Toby Schmitz, director Simon Phillips and lighting and set designer, Nick Schlieper. 

Like its sublime source material, the audience is reminded in rhythm and rhyme quite quickly and emphatically of Dylan Thomas, the very title of Part One of this Thomas tinted tome, A Lick of Night, conjures bible black habitat, but not with boat bobbing bays, more the midnight interior mindscape of the recently bereaved – picture of a person resembling a planet surrounded by a thick belt of space junk – and then the bible black, sloe black, corvid black blackbird makes his bombastic entrance, a crack and a whoosh, the hallway pitch black and freezing cold, the stage strewn and littered with a wreath of black feathers.

The overtones of Thomas and Hughes are honed and toned by a choral trio – Crow, Dad and Boys, triptych narrative navigating the relationship-wrecked, grief reefed, ghost line coast line of loss.

The Crow is a symbol of the blackness of Dad’s trauma, the black thought widower, winnowing for a lick of night in the morning, for a little break in the mourning, mascot of a dead parent society.

Dad is working on a book titled Ted Hughes’ Crow on the Couch: A Wild Analysis, the publishers of which hope might appeal to everyone sick of Ted & Sylvia archaeology.

Schmitz plays desolated Dad and cocky Crow, a deft delineation between human and avian with vocal and physical dexterity.

The boys, exquisitely rendered by Philip Lynch and Fraser Morrison, facing physical loss of mother, and the mental unmooring of father, mournfully intone: “Dad has gone. Crow is in the bathroom, where he often is because he likes the acoustics. We are crouched by the closed door listening. He is speaking very slowly, very clearly. He sounds old fashioned, like Dad’s vinyl recording of Dylan Thomas.”

With it’s visually arresting set, animated projections, precision lighting and live cello accompaniment by Freya Schack-Arnott, Grief is the Thing With Feathers settles into glorious shape like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.

Prose pours into poetry in serpentine reciprocity, streams of consciousness flow into an ocean of emotion, laughter, tears, love and fears, as this top flight adaptation takes flight, an accomplishment to crow about.