Skip to main content

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.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JOhiQU
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more