Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Adaptors: Simon Phillips, Nick Schlieper, Toby Schmitz
Director: Simon Phillips
Belvoir Street Theatre
July 26 – August 24, 2025
Adapted from Max Porter’s much praised novel, the Belvoir Street production of Grief is the Thing with Feathers is electrifying, fantastical and deeply moving. The original text, a disjunctive mixture of prose and poetry for three different voices exploring grief and healing, is treated with utmost respect by director, Simon Phillips, for its blackly funny and painfully sad inventiveness.
Living a comfortable, orderly life in a cosy London flat, a father and his two young sons are violently thrust into a world that no longer makes sense by the sudden death of wife, friend and mother. The boys struggle to understand their place in this new life where their dad is a different dad, and their different dad is marooned in a flat from which his wife has gone but which remains “an encyclopedia” of her former presence.
To the rescue of this flailing family comes Crow. He erupts uninvited into their cold world in an explosion of black feathers, declaring, “I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more”. Where does he come from? We don’t ask this about Mary Poppins. And maybe we shouldn’t get too hung up on the fact that the grieving father is a Ted Hughes scholar, the Ted who wrote Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow.
Just think of the crow we know, aka the shiny black Australian Raven, confidently meeting the eye, loutish, sociable, generally monogamous (a quality Ted Hughes must have missed) and smart. Imagine acting both the role of the bookish Dad and visceral Crow, the almost impossibility of the immediate transition from bereft Dad to rowdy, mothering, instinctual Crow, and appreciate the absolute brilliance of Toby Schmitz’s performance. At one moment he lies limply lamenting in a soft cultivated voice and the next he is Crow “performing some unbound [and bawdy] Crow stuff”.
Crows owns the space he inhabits. He alights on the desk jauntily shoving books aside, hops randomly about the room, and then perches on a chair with inconsiderate ease. By contrast, Dad is hesitant and unsure of his physicality – too long, too thin (but Schmitz is neither). He is safer with the works of a dead poet than seizing the day.
Crow’s stories to the boys are cheerfully frightening and blandly violent. We might question his claim that these tales are therapeutic easing the young into the knowledge that existence has equal parts of unreasoning cruelty and sudden loss as it does of moments of comfort and love. Fraser Morrison and Philip Lynch who play the role of the sons, capture the loose-limbed look of young boys and their changeable moods as they capture the stance of the resilient but wounded survivors they become as adults.
We know we will come to a time when Crow leaves, but the journey has been as illuminating as it has been dark. The Belvoir production of Grief is the Thing with Feathers will remain in the memory for a long time not just for Schmitz’s remarkable performance but for its complex and striking staging and the expressive punctuation of the cello, the score composed and performed by Freya Schak-Arnott.
