‘I’m really into cow farming,” says Katie Mitchell. It seems an unexpected interest for one of Europe’s most rigorous, eco-conscious theatre directors. But she was “brought up in the 1970s self-sufficiency movement, in the Brecon Beacons”, and now has “a little place in Wales, opposite a cow farm”.
Mitchell is talking dairy farming in a dressing room in London’s Royal Court theatre. We’re sitting with sound artist Melanie Wilson and playwright Nina Segal, her collaborators on a radical wordless project, Cow | Deer, which goes “between the ears” of its title characters. Tucking into Ottolenghi takeout during a rehearsal break, they describe how they are putting animals at the play’s centre and making sound its medium.
Wilson and Mitchell are longtime collaborators (including on Anatomy of a Suicide at the Royal Court in 2017), and both interested in exploring ways of addressing climate crisis. They began experimenting with conveying the experiences of different animals. “It was thinking through sound, with no narrative – just playing in a room,” says Wilson. As Mitchell explains, “We wanted to prove that presenting the more-than-human world would be as interesting and theatrical as the human world. We needed a writer’s help, but without words.” Enter Segal, an associate at the Royal Court. “I’m really interested in pushing the possibilities of what writing can be,” she says.
Animal hearing ranges are much wider than ours – a combine harvester sounds like an apocalypse
The piece, a co-production with the National Theatre of Greece, provides a day’s experience of the deer and cow: “the wild animal and the industrialised animal,” says Mitchell. “Each brushes up against humans,” Wilson adds, “in quite different and violent ways. One lives in spite of us, and one absolutely for us.” Sound helps us share their rich worlds. “We’re listening between the ears of the animals,” says Wilson, “trying to place the audience within their perspective, the way they navigate the world. Their frequency ranges are much wider than ours – so the effect of motorways or wind turbines, of our sound on them, is quite profound.” “A combine harvester is like an apocalypse for an animal,” Mitchell adds.
Mitchell’s farming contacts proved handy. “We were down on the farm for two days,” says Segal, “and it was amazing the amount that occurred – life and death, calves being born prematurely or not surviving.” Wilson also tracked deer around Britain. “I was out recording in north Devon, following a deer, and the wind was going away from me so she couldn’t smell me. I just watched her nosing in the hedgerows, or going in and out of a field – trying to capture the environments she would be in.”
‘It’s not human beings talking. That’s the key’ … director Katie Mitchell. Photograph: © Camilla Greenwell
Segal provided structure rather than dialogue. “It’s not the standard process of writing a play,” she says cheerfully. The cow and the deer’s day involves life-changing events, “but we’re paring it back to the most realistic version of what might happen”. Deep listening to the natural world, says Wilson, involves “a different experience of time and narrative. It might take five minutes to iterate a mouse running through a hedgerow.” With so much detail, says Segal, “you have to tune in”.
There are no puppets or pantomime costumes: it is sound that brings the animals to life. “There are three layers,” says Mitchell. “Mel’s field recording, the sound design, and then the live foley. It’s a very complex weave.” Two of the actors, Tom Espiner and Ruth Sullivan, are also experienced foley artists, adept at creating sound effects. “We spent a week together on the big set pieces, like how to do a cow giving birth,” says Wilson.
“Tom and Ruth brought suitcases full of different objects,” smiles Mitchell. “What will do the best swish of the cow’s tail, or the deer’s head going into a hedge?” For the audience, Wilson suggests, “there will be moments when you’re really aware of being in a theatre watching somebody manipulate some polystyrene balls which miraculously become a mouse, and other moments when you’re sinking into a forest.”
‘It’s not the standard process!’ …playwright Nina Segal. Photograph: © Camilla Greenwell
Listening can be a political act – “fierce resistance”, as Wilson describes it. “The climate crisis is full of grief,” she says. “We can’t provide solutions to the climate and biodiversity crisis. But we can glimpse other possibilities, other ways of being. This piece seems to bring out a tender empathy in people.”
“It’s listening to animals, not human beings talking,” Mitchell declares. “That’s the key thing.” Wilson has long championed “collective listening”, and Segal believes Cow | Deer “offers a different kind of listening. I think a lot of people feel they’re shouting loudly about the climate crisis, and somehow still not being heard”.
Segal discussed the piece with her dad, who has joined Extinction Rebellion protests as a drummer. “They’re utilising sound to draw attention, in this purposefully loud way. Sound is an important disruptor,” she says. “This is a different direction – using sound to draw attention to a world you might not otherwise hear.”
Cow | Deer is at the Royal Court, London, until 11 October