‘Murmurations’, immersive local theatre at its best.
Local climate campaigner and activist Ruth Kettle-Frisby today shares her review on ‘Murmurations’, a Havering Changing performance at Bedford’s Park.
Murmurations is immersive local theatre at its best. A captivating achievement, shaped as a guided woodland tour. Production, audience, and even the breathtaking scenery of Bedford’s Park itself are intriguingly integrated, blurring aesthetic boundaries to maintain its creative illusion.
Mysterious sounds emanate from headphones, and actors – whose paths cross through time, as well as space – seamlessly appear, vanish and reemerge. You witness them from short distances, listening in on their private conversations as they struggle to unravel personal and cultural entanglements: both with each other, and with our shared natural environment.
Under the umbrella of climate change, the play explores environmental concerns that are strikingly pertinent to Havering residents right now, such as air pollution, competing attitudes to the ULEZ expansion, and proposed greenbelt development for financial gain.However, what really stands out is that nothing is so lofty as to escape frequent injections of well-placed humour; you’ll find yourself chuckling away, whatever your thoughts on these matters!
Murmurations will make you laugh – even cry at times(with an especially stirring performance by Emily Eversden) – and perhaps even gently challenge your thinking. It is about the power of making transformative human connections with emotional openness, rather than snap judgements. It works its way towards a message about cultivating a shared love of nature that inspires the will to protect it, but there is nothing preachy about this play.
All the actors are superb. Chanice Hird plays tour guide Chloe with warmth and charm – far from being a trail-blazing, self-assured environmentalist – she is learning to tread new pathways alongside you. Bouncing her ideas off the audience and experimenting with expressing herself through spoken word, she negotiates her way through relatable feelings of self-doubt and deference to others in the context of urban and gender inequality. Hird delivers a lovely line about having never seen a cow outside the two-dimensional confines of a yoghurt pot lid, and portrays Chloe’s light shining more vividly as the tour progresses.
Murmurations feels freshly innovative; it’s part of a wider creative movement that approaches environmental subjects with a positive sense of natural wonderment, combined with empathy, fun and a lightness of touch. Transformative change is conceptualised as an uneven trail to stumble along, where – even when faced with deepest grief, confusion, division and social inequality –there is always hope.
The play gradually draws to a close. As you walk towards the Visitors Centre where you started, there is time to look out across the grassy stillness as it recedes towards the spectacularly etched London skyline,peering silently up from behind prominent fields of noisy red deer. It lifts the spirits to reflect on more peaceful possibilities imagined in Murmurations: to cross-pollinate over crumpled Polos found in pockets, nourishing each other with the will to plant small seeds, even if they never germinate in our lifetimes.
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