GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

By Diana Simmonds

August 1 2025

GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS, Belvoir with Andrew Henry Presents at Belvoir Upstairs, 26 July - 24 August 2025. Photography - Brett Boardman

This 100-minute adaptation of Max Porter’s 2015 novel (novella? It’s just 114 pages) is simultaneously anchored by and takes free flight from the original. Appropriate, perhaps, as the overarching character-image of the evening is the mythic Crow of British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes’s devising. Played here by a brilliant, mesmerising Toby Schmitz, Crow could also be seen as unter ego to Schmitz’s human character – earth- and grief-bound Dad.

As the first of Nick Schlieper’s lighting states go up on a wintry seascape backdrop, fronted by a gleaming wet strip of black basalt beach, Dad is prowling between his conflicting feelings and his desk. He is a writer and is trying to finish an overdue book. His adored wife is dead – a household accident – and his publisher has kindly suggested that completing the book – an analysis of Hughes’s Crow – might be a bit much right now. And there’s the “kindness” of “kind” friends, neighbours, and strangers to cope with. (Schmitz gives the two words a twisted, comical acidity enough to make one resolve never to bake a lasagne for a bereaved person.)

That’s a thing about this production: there’s much wry and laugh-aloud humour in what might have been – in lesser hands – an exercise in the lugubrious. The adaptation is credited to Schmitz, Schlieper, and the play’s director, Simon Phillips. As the latter could wrest laughter and lightness out of a rock, it’s no surprise that this human tragedy is so leavened, to exhilarating effect.

Dad has two Boys (Philip Lynch and Fraser Morrison) who, in their youth, seem to be in a better place to deal with their loss than the agonised, bereft father. The adult actors are touching in the authenticity they bring to the beaming boyishness of young teens, at everyday play as well as living the glib life of the innocent.

They are a stark contrast to Dad, who, in the shapeshifting person of Schmitz, when donning the black leather jacket to assume the character of Crow, suddenly epitomises Ted Hughes’s description:
“He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.”
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.”

The drama of the dual personas is heightened by Jon Weber’s black and white Goya-esque illustrations, projected with other effects by video designer Craig Wilkinson, and enhanced by Daniel Herten’s hyper-real sound design. All the while, the visual spectacle and human drama are intensified by a composed and improvised score for cello by Freya Schack-Arnott. Spotlit and clad in vivid scarlet, she plays from a perch above the action and is integral to the whole.

All in all, the creative team achieves an unusually coherent artistic synchronicity in that each appears to have been working to the same end in the same room at the same time. (It’s not always the case.) Coupled with the boundless energy and intelligence of Toby Schmitz’s protean performance, it’s impossible not to be swept up into the poetry, imagination, and stagecraft of this beautiful production.

Settling into one’s seat in a theatre on any given night, the unspoken basic wish is to be entertained and transported, to laugh or cry, or both. To be reminded that theatre gives the very best of humanity, even when depicting the worst. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve read the book because this isn’t the book. It’s theatre as alive, confounding, entrancing, and magical as it can ever be. Can’t ask more than that.