Concealing his eyes beneath a black hood, sticking his arms, elbows out, behind his back, he sprints restlessly this way and that, booming out words in a deep, patrician voice amplified by a body mic. Yet as Crow he takes flight: a rustling, febrile, intense presence darting round the house like a whirling dervish. No one’s home and, when he turns to let us in on his grief in long, languid monologues, his empty, tired eyes seem to plead with us for relief. Swaddled up in a double duvet, wrapped in a black dressing gown, he shuffles across the stage and around Jamie Vartam’s exploded house, drifting from bedroom to kitchen to toss two kids’ breakfasts together beneath the radio’s blather.

In a whirlwind performance, he swings from the ordinary to the otherwordly - sometimes a middle-aged man on autopilot, sometimes a dark spirit on the rampage.Īs the grieving father, Murphy’s flatly unremarkable: a bushy mustache softens the sharpness of his cheekbones, rustic brown clothes mute his crystal blue eyes.

Here, Walsh’s longtime collaborator Murphy doubles up as both the bereaved man and the bird, making it clear that Crow is somehow inseparable from him: a manifestation of his mental state. If Porter’s writing collapses the line between fantasy and reality, the stage can reinstate it. Porter lists its mutations: “excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, specter, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter.” Grief haunts and comforts us, cradles us and hollows us out. An embodiment of the man’s grief, Crow is a shadowy, slippery, almost a shapeshifting thing - at once nightmare and protector, monster and mate. A literature scholar with two young sons, he’s visited by a figure from the collection Ted Hughes wrote in the wake of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Crow: a huge black bird who drops feathers on the family’s pillows as they sleep. Porter’s text, stretched out in fragments over the page, follows a father in a fugue state after his wife’s sudden death. Onstage, however, it slips out of shape, its subtleties drowned out by a bravura turn by star Cillian Murphy.Įven the title is fuzzy.

Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn after its current Barbican Centre run, revolves around the notion that loss defies language - even as it pins a widower’s grief to the page. Few writers have caught that as well as Max Porter, whose debut novel “ Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” adapted for the stage by Enda Walsh and heading to St. Each grieving process takes its own time, each finds its own form. Grief gets us all in the end and, when it does, it comes without guidance notes or instructions.

Grief is the thing with feathers pages