‘Do they always do that?’
‘Who?’
‘The birds.’
‘No. It’s unusual. It’s the marsh. The marsh calls them. They’ve been coming a thousand years.’
Wattmore and Griffin are ex-Cambridge college gardeners, living with secrets and darkness in the bleakness of the Fens. A £2000 pound poetry prize run by the university could be the blessing they’re after to clear Wattmore’s mysterious debt, if only they knew anything about poetry. As bird-watchers flock to the marshes near their cabin to catch a glimpse of the elusive night heron, the arrival of ex-convict Bolla to this strange family brings an unexpected female force and their lives unravel before us.
Haunting and poetic, Butterworth’s second play brims with absurd humour and symbolic imagery. This Week 7 Lent show lays humanity bare in a setting we know well, but have not seen like this before.
Prepare for shock, for laughs and underscoring it all, the urgent howls of the freezing Cambridgeshire wind.