Cow | Deer gets ‘between the ears’ of animals, creating mouse noises with polystyrene balls and comparing wild creatures with industrialised ones. So if there’s no dialogue, what did its writer do? Director Katie Mitchell reveals all
‘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.
