Cow | Deer, Royal Court review - paradox-rich account of non-human life

I love irony. Especially beautiful irony. So I’m very excited about the ironic gesture of staging a show with no words at the Royal Court, a venue which boasts of being the country’s premier new writing theatre. Billed as “a new experiment in performance”. Cow | Deer uses only sound to evoke the lives of two animals, one domesticated, the other wild.

Created by director Katie Mitchell, writer Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, the piece is performed using the talents of a quartet of performers and Foley artists (Foley being sound effects usually added post-production to films, and so on). This short hour-long performance is a listening experience, “an invitation to enter the more-than-human world”.

Although this project is a laudable attempt to remind us that human beings are only one part of the world, the setting of the piece is very limited: a nursery cow field and wooded area in England. So its evocation of nature and the lives of a cow and a deer is rather familiar. I don’t feel any sense of estrangement. The action is likewise limited to the cow giving birth to a calf, and the deer rather predictably getting hurt on the road. Both animals suffer from interactions with humans. Despite the stated attempt to “look beyond the human stories of the climate crisis”, this is a story mainly about the effects of human actions. Cow | Deer is a bellow of distress at the way we mistreat the beautiful beasts in our midst.

The aim of the show is a feminist one. In one of several programme notes, Mitchell, Segal and Wilson advocate not only the act of listening to nature, but argue that we can think of this as “feminist listening”, paying attention to the unheard and the submerged sounds of the world. This equation of other animal species with human politics seems curiously anthropocentric to me. And unconvincing. If the feminism of the show is part of its project then the way both animals are represented is problematic. Both are constructed as victims, with very limited agency. We are encouraged to an easy empathy with them as casualties, but they remain products of our very human domination of England’s countryside.

The main irony of this experiment in a theatre “with no words” is twofold. On the one hand, the audience can’t be trusted to understand the show: not only does an usher hand out cards that explain the fact that this is “a listening experience”, and detail what we should listen out for, but this is then repeated in announcement. Surely a true experiment would have the courage of its own convictions? Secondly, the existence of a traditional playtext undermines the notion of there being no words. In fact, Mitchell, Segal and Wilson’s playtext explains in marvellous detail everything that happens, often very subtly, on stage.

So while listening to the performance at first involves hearing rustling, hooves on grass, breaths and recordings of bird song and mooing, you have to read the text to know that the deer is a one-year-old roe and the cow two years’ old and “heavily pregnant”. Although the general ambiance is clearly evoked by sound, the details – a fox in the brambles, a passing badger, a startled robin – need to be specified by the printed word. Otherwise you can’t tell one scurrying creature from another. So much for hearing the “more-than-human world”. Yet the experience of listening, and watching the performers rustle tinsel and magnetic tape, beat pads of grass, use a blue water bottle to simulate a cow emptying her bladder, and so, is an intriguing pleasure.

What comes across is the traditional pastoral loveliness of the English countryside in summer, as ever a metaphor for the nation, and its disturbance by evidence of human cruelty. Here the arrival of farm machinery, the presence of roads and cars, graphically and loudly indicate the fearsome intrusion of people into the already compromised natural world of farms and segregated woodland. Unlike Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, which conveys our feelings about nature, Cow | Deer illustrates the discomfort of animal life objectively, at a distance. Yet, as in Andrea Arnold’s 2021 documentary Cow, the dairy industry is shown as a harsh place for animals.

For me, sitting in the audience, in the middle of a great urban megalopolis and irritated by the current tube strike and rain storms, this journey into the countryside in summer had an occasionally sunny feel. It takes a while to get into it, and you can either watch the detailed performance of Foley effects, which can be amusing as well as intrguing, or just close your eyes. What I enjoy is the relaxed feeling, the temptation to zone out – and not really miss anything. The sensation of being at a loss. I like the ambience of the immersion. And the intrusions of cruelty make me very sad. But I have to admit a lot of this is rather dull as well, and my understanding of animal life remains unenlightened.

A co-production with the National Theatre of Greece, Cow | Deer is designed by Alex Eales, with Foley score by Tom Espiner and Ruth Sullivan, who perform on a stage full of sound-effect gadgets, some specialized, some domestic, along with actors Pandora Colin and Tatenda Matsvai. The sound quality is superb. I have to say that the effect of the performance is both mind-expandingly extraordinary and brain-crushingly banal. There’s a real sense of occasion with a performance that encourages you to close your eyes and just listen, yet there’s also an irritating feeling of predictability and familiarity with the content. More paradoxical, perhaps, than just ironic.

• Cow | Deer at the Royal Court until 11 October  
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk

@AleksSierz