Down the road from the Royal Court, a building is adorned with the bust of a cow – a reminder that this area of London was once home to grazing dairy cattle and has history as farmland. Cow | Deer, an hour-long “experiment in performance”, co-created by director Katie Mitchell, writer Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, is a sort of theatrical rewilding as the Upstairs stage is given over to a summer’s day in the life of a heavily pregnant cow and a young roe deer.
Past productions at the Court have featured live animals, including half a dozen goats (eponymous stars of Liwaa Yazji’s play) and a scene-stealing goose (in Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman). Here, the pair’s presence is instead painstakingly felt through myriad foley sound effects and field recordings. Standing at hay-bale desks, a cast of four – Pandora Colin, Tom Espiner, Tatenda Matsvai and Ruth Sullivan – get to work making noises with natural materials and manmade objects: gravel and tinsel, raffia and rope, a hot water bottle and a watering can. Plants and herbs are ground up throughout, their scent slowly filling the room.
