Grief is the Thing with Feathers comes to the stage with a glorious intensity of purpose
- Written by: Huw Griffiths, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Sydney
The idea of the titular Crow in Ted Hughes’ poems is wild, untameable and irreducible to words. In an early poem in the sequence, words come at Crow from all angles but he just ignores them. Finally, “Words retreated, suddenly afraid / Into the skull of a dead jester / Taking the whole world with them”.
Crow just yawns: “long ago / He had picked that skull empty”. A figure that is ancient and beyond the reach of gods or human belief systems, Hughes’ Crow resists ever being pinned down or fully understood.
In Max Porter’s 2015 novella, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, a version of Hughes’ Crow enters the life of a bereaved Dad, newly left to look after his two sons after the death of his wife.
Dad is a literary scholar, writing a book about Ted Hughes, and Crow is a metaphor come to life, some version of the endless grief through which he is living.
But Porter’s Crow is not quite the same thing as Hughes’ irredeemable half-myth/half-beast. This crow cares: “I do eat baby rabbits, plunder nests, swallow filth, cheat death […] But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief”. And he is self-aware, too – aware that Hughes’ mythical beast image can also just be a performance, a piece of schtick: “I do this, perform some unbound crow stuff, for him”.
Now, a new adaptation of the novella brings the story to the Belvoir stage.
Devastation and renewal
Toby Schmitz as both Dad and Crow is just brilliant. He exactly captures the messy contradictions of this situation, shifting between the quiet melancholy and stifled rage of the widower and the restless, contradictory energies of Crow.
The latter he performs in recognisable Schmitz fashion: a leery and mischievous outsider, challenging the audience and holding their attention just as much as he teases, taunts and cajoles both Dad and his two sons.
His performance brings out the humour of Porter’s book, the sense of its own absurdity that shadows his story of devastation and tentative renewal.
Also on stage are Philip Lynch and Fraser Morrison as the two boys, doing a great job (as the characters do in Porter’s book) of providing an emotional antidote to the wheeling terror that sometimes spins off Dad’s encounter with Crow.
Schmitz adapted the book with director, Simon Phillips, and designer, Nick Schlieper. They have only very subtly altered the text in ways that enable a dynamic live performance, conversations between Dad, Crow and Boys.
Tying the piece together are compelling video direction and live music. The former is genuinely exciting, as it etches the presence of Crow’s mythology across the stage, aided by Craig Wilkinson’s work as illustrator, clearly taking inspiration from Hughes’ original illustrator, Leonard Baskin. Composer and cellist, Freya Schack-Arnott provides a stunning and emotional soundtrack throughout, at times improvising to the action.
An intensity of purpose
Porter’s novel is ten years old this year. It has been ridiculously successful for a slender (114 pages) and apparently unconventional book.
Seeming to imitate some of the conventions of 20th century modernism (non-linear narratives; stream-of-consciousness; an interplay of myth and reality; shifting perspectives from miniscule detail to grand narrative), it should not have been destined to occupy the best-seller list.
And, yet, multiple awards later, it remains in regular rotation on the central displays of high street bookstores around the world. It has been adapted for the stage before, in a successful production in London starring Cillian Murphy in 2019, and in a less well-received 2025 film starrring Benedict Cumberbatch.
It would be easy to dismiss this success as something to do with the aesthetic world within which it situates itself. Careful to use Faber and Faber’s classic font, Albertus (something it shares with the Belvoir production when passages are projected above the stage), the book is an elegant product that advertises its own self-conscious literariness.
But this assessment would miss the brilliance, the sophistication and the tender power of Porter’s writing, as well as the way that the book has already got there before you.
Porter plays with his own contemporary taming of older and wilder literary traditions. If Hughes’ Crow has been domesticated in Porter’s use of him (I can’t imagine Hughes’ Crow leaving us with the line, “Just be kind and look out for your brother”), he knows that this sentimentality is now hard-earned and not to be ignored.
What this production adds to Porter’s beautiful book is an intensity of purpose. This is a gloriously collaborative effort, from theatre makers at the height of their powers, to communicate the beauty that persists through the pain and degradation that life throws at us.
Grief is the Thing with Feathers is at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, until August 24.
Authors: Huw Griffiths, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Sydney
