In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief - Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. By having Murphy play the father and the crow, the production reinforces the connection between the human and animal worlds, and suggests that poetic fixations have a potentially curative power.In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Murphy achieves the transition by donning a hooded, monk-like black robe, hopping around the stage on splayed feet, leaping on and off bunk beds and desks and lowering his voice to speak into various kinds of microphone. Here he is one moment the sad dad thinking of his dead wife and caring anxiously for his two children (David Evans and Leo Hart) the next he becomes the visiting crow who is a mix, as novelist Kirsty Gunn wrote, of analyst and amanuensis. I remember him jumping on to a high ledge with the agility of a gazelle. Murphy proved in Walsh’s play Ballyturk that he is a prodigiously athletic actor.
Adapted and directed by Walsh, the result is highly theatrical – sometimes excessively so – but Murphy’s performance, as both a bereaved husband struggling to write a book about Ted Hughes and as the crow who invades the writer’s home and his imagination, is a thing of wonder. C illian Murphy and Enda Walsh have teamed up to bring Max Porter’s extraordinary mix of novel and poem about grief to the stage.
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