Let’s first acknowledge that there is not a person alive who is currently torn between spending their birthday theatre vouchers on a choice between either Mamma Mia! or Cow | Deer.
Even if you have never heard of the great avant-garde director Katie Mitchell, it seems inconceivable that you would book into her Cow | Deer – a play whose publicity information clearly states that it is about a cow and a deer and features no dialogue – and go expecting a night of high-octane commercial theatre lulz.
The caveat, then, is that if you do think Cow | Deer sounds like a horrible idea then I am not here to convince you otherwise. Don’t take a risk on it! You would probably hate it. See Mamma Mia!
Admin over, let’s get down to business. For Mitchell devotees and open-minded souls who think the premise sounds wild enough to be interesting, Cow | Deer is a virtuosic foley performance in which a quartet of actors (Pandora Colin, Tom Espiner, Tatenda Matavai and Ruth Sullivan) deploy a colossal array of objects – from hay bales to hot water bottles – to create the sounds of a cow and also a deer.
They’re augmented by sound design from co-creator Melanie Wilson that is heavy on animal noises (lots of birdsong, lots of cows, ie the actors don’t have to moo) and a script from Nina Segal that imposes a degree of discipline and direction and ultimately a rather haunting ‘story’ about humanity’s disruption of ordered nature.
An audacious technical exercise the likes of which you’re unlikely to ever see in a theatre again
At first I tried to get immersed in it: close your eyes and you can see the deer frolicking freely through nature, and the cow living a more industrialised life at a nearby farm. After a while I’m sorry to say I got a bit bored of this: I understand that the show is explicitly designed to de-centre humanity from its storytelling, but around the middle it feels like it has become somewhat vague as to what the beasts are actually up to. I drifted off, slightly.
Then I stopped closing my eyes and looked at what the performers were actually doing. It’s a fascinating duality of Mitchell’s production that while it really is about a deer and a cow and has a very ‘pro-nature’ lens, it is also a dazzlingly coordinated exercise in pure artifice, a sort of vindication of human ingenuity. The four actors are in constant, fluid motion as they fiddle with everything from glittery pom poms to what looks like bundles of herbs to conjure the beasts and their world. It’s hypotonic, like a dance - I became utterly engrossed in the dizzying technical rhythms of the Mitchell-directed performance.
And then, towards the end, the story kicks back in and its themes of humanity intruding upon nature come to an unnerving denouement – maybe I’d given up on trying to picture the animals, but the show's message and meaning felt clearer than ever. If you worry around the middle if it’s going somewhere then trust me, it is.
Even as a dyed-in-the -wool Katie Mitchell fan I definitely went on a journey with Cow | Deer. But it persuaded me by the end. Nobody makes theatre like Katie Mitchell, and her latest is an audacious technical exercise the likes of which you’re unlikely to ever see in a theatre again, given heart and soul by its bracingly earnest concern for nature.
