If Shakespeare was indeed an upstart crow, then he’s alive and well in Max Morgan’s latest play Carrion at The Pilch.
The dramatis animalia consist of a bear, a fox and a crow, all fighting for survival in a forest hitherto untouched by man. Aravind Ravi’s Bear is a burly, aging leader of the pack who dreams of retiring and moving downriver with the wife and kids. Suzi Darrington’s Fox is considerably dumber than folktales of wily Reynards would have you believe (ultimately falling head over heels in love with a chicken). And Ethan Bareham’s Crow is a Machiavellian schemer whose speeches slither beguilingly between modern English and Renaissance metaphysics so smoothly you cannot see the join. Sometimes he’s Bosola from The Duchess of Malfi, sometimes Antony at his most manipulative from Antony and Cleopatra. But mostly he is Iago, pouring verbal poison in Bear’s ears and sowing self-destruction even as the humans start to torch the three friends’ habitat.
It’s Othello meets Bambi. And, astonishingly, that’s a good thing.
Carrion has a unique atmosphere. Director Rosie Morgan-Males has somehow stepped neatly between the cracks and pitfalls of people-acting-as-animals, while still enabling the characters to retain their identifiable creature features. So there is no hint of youth theatre animal embodiment here, no licking of genitals or lifting a forepaw in hesitation. Bear, Fox and Crow behave more or less like people, albeit with the limitations of their respective genera. ‘You haven’t even got a fucking penis!’ shouts Fox at Crow, who comes back with, ‘Actually, it’s a cloaca I’ll have you know.’ They are so human, these animals, that it’s hard to escape the feeling that, by destroying them, we are really destroying ourselves. Maybe that is the point.
Buoyed along by a script that is both funny and unapologetically unconventional, the play gradually reveals a cluster of sub-plots that converge on a catastrophe currently being played out in forests all over our planet. It’s a message we can’t hear too often, but it’s rarely been delivered quite like this. The infighting over who will take over from Bear as leader of the pack plays out like a Sylvan Succession, and the ending features a simple but eloquently powerful special effect that leaves you in no doubt that the rest is silence. All those comic exchanges were merely distractions on the primrose path to the forest bonfire.
Perhaps the most powerful speech in the entire play, however, is the opening monologue from Crow. Gazing with a merciless sneer at the audience surrounding him through 360 degrees, Bareham muses on the philosophical conundrum If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? His conclusion is chilling: ‘I am that fucking nobody’. For a moment, it’s as if Ted Hughes’ Crow has come to life, and we are in his firing line. Thrilling, and terrifying.
With this show’s strong ecological message in mind, it’s nice to see that Max Morgan is reusing the artificial grass floor that first saw service during his earlier play Fêtid. (Apparently it’s been rolled up in the corridor outside his bedroom ever since.) The rest of the design is restrained but beautifully realised: glittering tendrils and leaves dangling around the set, suggesting a forest almost too exquisite to be real, almost too delicate to survive. And the background sound as the audience take their seats is a deep, thrumming guitar, perfectly setting the tone of nature in harmony, like George Harrison playing live in a massage therapy room.
In Bambi, one of the most tear-jerking lines is delivered by the Great Prince of the Forest after Bambi’s mother has died at the hands of men: ‘Your mother can't be with you anymore. Come, my son.’ At least that gives a smidgeon of confidence for the future. Carrion leaves us with no such hope… apart from a distinct sense of optimism for the future careers of those involved in its creation.