Cow | Deer at the Royal Court – review

Deer | Cow is an experiment. A listening exercise. A feminist listening exercise according to the programme. Yet it feels thinner than its ambition.

It’s making the serious point that the climate emergency is going on in the background of our lives, yet we are not listening to it. Yet the story it tells in its wordless drama is both sometimes obscure and slightly twee.

The idea is striking. Director Katie Mitchell, Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson, the two Foley artists with whom she has worked on her Live Cinema productions, have imagined a non-human scenario which plunges the audience into a field in summer, and the world of two animals, a deer and a heavily pregnant cow.

Using only sound effects, performed live by four Foley artists and a pre-recorded track to which they respond, it evokes a day in which a calf is born and taken away from its mother, and a deer runs into the road. Using a detailed published text like a score, the performers are musicians as much as technicians, operating like a sensitive quartet.

Their skill is enormous. As an audience, you are invited to close your eyes and just listen. But then you’d miss these four extraordinary performers moving their hands along bales of hay like dancers, creating the rhythm of hooves with their fingers, or the sound of a step on mud with a hand plunged in a bowl of cream, or the rustle of undergrowth by wringing a plant’s leaves.

Pak choi and leaves prove remarkably useful for the sounds of grazing and munching. Tinsel creates a breath of breeze. There’s a lovely moment of rumination when the cow eats, drinks and chews, while flicking flies away with its tail, all conjured by judicious crumpling of foliage, a leather frond and a wet towel.

Bobbins create scuttling field mice, while the soundtrack plays the vicious metallic roar of a combine harvester. The sounds of a river are not recorded but created with a fish tank of water. Birth uses a balloon, more pak choi and a watermelon.

Not all the noises are instantly recognisable, and it is not always clear precisely what is going on. I needed a script to tell me that the calf is being taken away on a quad bike and I entirely missed a herd of cows. A card handed out encourages us not to worry too much about getting lost. The act of listening is all. “You may not recognise each sound you hear. That’s understandable – you’re human”, it says.

That’s all very well, but it can get rather dull. I tried listening with my eyes closed, attempting to get lost in the aural landscape. But it felt repetitive. Eyes open, it’s the wonder of the Foley performers that catches the heart. It’s a bold experiment, but it remains an intriguing sketch rather than a fully realised portrait.