Grief Is the Thing With Feathers review Cillian Murphy is a wonder
Barbican, London
Murphy has an astonishing athleticism playing both man and crow in an adaptation of Max Porter’s story of grief
Cillian Murphy and Enda Walsh have teamed up to bring Max Porter’s extraordinary mix of novel and poem about grief to the stage. Adapted and directed by Walsh, the result is highly theatrical – sometimes excessively so – but Murphy’s performance, as both a bereaved husband struggling to write a book about Ted Hughes and as the crow who invades the writer’s home and his imagination, is a thing of wonder.
Murphy proved in Walsh’s play Ballyturk that he is a prodigiously athletic actor. I remember him jumping on to a high ledge with the agility of a gazelle. Here he is one moment the sad dad thinking of his dead wife and caring anxiously for his two children (David Evans and Leo Hart); the next he becomes the visiting crow who is a mix, as novelist Kirsty Gunn wrote, of analyst and amanuensis. Murphy achieves the transition by donning a hooded, monk-like black robe, hopping around the stage on splayed feet, leaping on and off bunk beds and desks and lowering his voice to speak into various kinds of microphone. By having Murphy play the father and the crow, the production reinforces the connection between the human and animal worlds, and suggests that poetic fixations have a potentially curative power.
The performance is most moving at the end, when the father, holding his children’s hands, reiterates his love for his lost wife. Before that we get a battery of visual and aural effects. Passages from Porter’s text are inscribed on the back wall of Jamie Vartan’s set, Will Duke’s projections show us the crow drawings the dad obsessively makes and Helen Atkinson’s sound design incorporates everything from the raging elements to intimations of global disaster. We also see film of the late mum (Hattie Morahan), who gets to tell the story of her husband’s brief encounter with Hughes at an Oxford lecture.
Even though I would have liked more straightforward reliance on Porter’s text, I shall long be haunted by Murphy’s performance, which embodies domestic grief and shows how a monomaniacal fantasy can provide hope and rescue.
At the Barbican, London, until 13 April.
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