Theatre feels like the perfect home for the wild and poetic Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Max Porter’s slim book – a cross between a novella and a tone poem. The book lives in the space between reality and imagination where, after the death of his wife, a Ted Hughes scholar and his two young sons are visited by a giant talking crow.
This is a space that theatre, with its suspension of disbelief and gestural staging and imagery (where a box can become a chair, a bed, or a mountain), inherently understands. We make our feelings into symbols and stories so we can process them, and we’ve been doing it for centuries on stage.
