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The Guardian
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Grief is the Thing With Feathers review – Max Porter adaptation plays it safe
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. Porter's book, published in 2015, has been adapted for live performance at least seven times (with more in the pipeline). This year, it's Belvoir's turn to take the man, his boys, and their crow and show an audience how digging into the guts of feeling can cut a path through. It's a team that's no stranger to ghosts, the gothic, or theatricalising literature. The co-adapters are director Simon Phillips (Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour's Phantom of the Opera) and lighting designer Nick Schlieper (Sydney Theatre Company's Dracula), who both co-designed the set, and Toby Schmitz (Netflix's Boy Swallows Universe), who plays Dad and Crow. Onstage in a corner is Freya Schack-Arnott, the show's composer, playing a mournful cello that seems to haunt Dad specifically. Sound designer Daniel Herten conjures a murmur of fluttering wings whenever Schmitz slips on his leather jacket to become Crow, playing with unseen presences. It's a straightforward production, largely following the book's triptych of short prose poems in the alternating perspectives of Dad, Boys (played here by adult actors Philip Lynch and Fraser Morrison) and Crow. When Dad has the floor, we stay grounded in realism – he grapples with raw emotions and haunting memories alongside the day-to-day of loss, somehow putting one foot in front of the other when his life is shattered. He worries about his sons; he becomes 'odd'. He conjures this feathered analyst-cum-babysitter-cum-trickster from his research into Hughes' 1970 poem cycle Crow – or perhaps Crow tastes the family's grief and flies from poetry to their side. Either option feels – as it does in the book – surreal but strangely correct. Inhabiting the lost Dad, Schmitz makes a great effort to access tenderness and let his language be lovely; it's part-performance, part-oration. It doesn't always work but Porter's words have power – throughout the show, there is a constant audience murmur of sniffles and sobs. As Crow, Schmitz finds more avian postures – such as a tilt of the head, delivering his spray of his words like pokes from a beak. Schlieper's moody lights seem to bend around Crow; he casts shadows that are, depending on the scene, a threat or an embrace. Flitting around the edges of the stage before swooping to its centre in a rush of energy are the Boys (in beautiful performances – Lynch is remarkably poignant as the youngest child), whose stories shift from accounts of childhood adventures to tales of mythic metaphor, as they try to reassemble themselves and grow up into their changed world. There is great permission in this production, as in the book, for each audience member to give grief the shape and space it needs, and on opening night as people near me wept, and as rain hammered down on the roof, it was almost transporting: we almost fell into Crow's world. But this is a straightforward adaptation, in script and staging, and that keeps us grounded in our own world. Phillips and Schlieper have constructed a world of black and grey: stones at the door, feathers that fall through the air and coat the space. It's all backdropped by animated illustrations (by Jon Weber, with video design by Craig Wilkinson), also predominantly in black and greys. These illustrations literalise the scenes: there's the metaphoric forest in which the boys confront an aspect of their grief; there's Crow, watching; there's a flashback scene. There's something flattened and lost in this approach: by taking the book's sacred imaginative space – where a reader, spurred to new ideas, conjures up their own images – and turning it into something literal, the production feels too prescriptive, too safe. It's a missed opportunity: in the theatre, a blank black box can light up brains and unlock stores of wonder as we build new realities; here, we're directed to see everything, even Crow, the exact same way. For some, this will work. For others, it could feel like being held at arm's length from the mess and guts the book invited us to drown in until we could climb our way out. Grief is the Thing With Feathers is at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, until 24 August
Perth Now
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
New SBS series follows Agatha Christie's footsteps
I've spent the past weekend steaming through the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Empress of Australia, a passenger liner at the centre of WA author and actor Toby Schmitz's grizzly-but-great debut novel, The Empress Murders. His book, which I inhaled over the course of a weekend, is set in 1925, and is a fantastically dark rumination on the end of the British Empire, the legacy of World War I and a close-up look at colonialism and the murky confusion the world found itself in at the start of last century — it's also a ripping murder mystery. Having spent so much time in that world, I decided to stay in similar terrain and dive into this fabulous travel series, which sees Sir David Suchet, the man who inhabited Agatha Christie's best-known creation, Inspector Hercule Poirot, for 25 years on TV — as he follows her footsteps, retracing early trips the crime novelist took with her then-husband Archie before she became famous (and famously reclusive) in later life. In 1922, Christie, along with her husband, found herself crossing the world on a passenger ship much like the one that's central to Schmitz's book, tasked with visiting various countries to help promote an upcoming British Empire exhibition. The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz. Credit: Supplied Suchet's first stop is South Africa; in 1924, Christie published a detective novel set there, and in episode one Suchet, armed with his old Leica camera, is off to Cape Town. Later episodes see him travel to Australia, New Zealand and Canada — even Hawaii. It's a delight to traverse the globe in his gentle presence. And — praise be! — there are no murderers along for the ride, though there is plenty of discussion of the devastating violence wrought in the name of king and country. Seek this series out, and give Schmitz's book a read, too. Though be warned: his is a much choppier crossing. Marta Dusseldorp is back for a second season of the delightfully oddball crime drama, Bay Of Fires. Credit: Supplied There's much to like about this Tasmanian crime series, which sees the always-watchable Marta Dusseldorp starring as Stella, a mum-on-the-run in witness protection — it's so delightfully odd! Season two sees her still stranded in off-kilter Mystery Bay with her kids, making the best of things by running the town's criminal enterprises. Mystery Bay's wacky inhabitants have got used to the spoils of their ill-gotten gains, but their harmonious anonymity is about to be tested as Stella finds herself in the sights of an 'unhinged apiarist drug lord' and 'maniacal doomsday cult'. It can't end well. Worth a second look, and a satisfying continuation of the story. Nicolas Cage in The Surfer. Credit: Supplied / RegionalHUB Remember when Nicolas Cage spent a few weeks living down south, shopping at the Asian grocery store in Busselton? He was there shooting this psychedelic surf thriller for Stan. Worth a look for the curious. This year's competitors on Dancing With The Stars. Credit: Nicholas Wilson Rebecca Gibney, Susie O'Neill, Felicity Ward, Osher Gunsberg and Shaun Micallef are just some of the stars making their dance floor debut this Sunday. You KNOW I'll be tuning in to see how they fare. America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is back for a second series. Credit: Supplied Sorry, not sorry, but I loved the first season of this doco. This one follows the 2024-25 cheerleading squad from auditions right through to the season, and it won't be smooth sailing. Cannot wait to feel woefully inadequate as I check back in with these impossibly glamorous gals.
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz review – Jazz Age mystery packed with corpses and charisma
On stepping aboard the Empress of Australia, the setting for Toby Schmitz's debut novel, I thought I might be in for a fizzy nautical romp. I rather hoped so. The news, presently, is mostly vile; a parade of cruelty, stupidity and profound, preventable suffering. A Jazz Age mystery authored by a celebrated Australian actor – you'll have seen him on mainstages across the country, and recently in the TV adaptation of Boy Swallows Universe – sounded like just the ticket. In the early chapters of The Empress Murders, we have just one corpse to contend with, and many dazzling characters to follow through the staterooms and corridors of the upper and lower decks. Inspector Archie Daniels, the ship's detective, seems like a glum chap, Chief Steward Rowling is sweatily unwell, and we learn quickly that Mr Frey, an Australian poet, fought at the Somme and Gallipoli. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning But the war is over, it's 1925, and the Empress has been fitted out with a new cabaret saloon. The passengers are primed to drink and dance and drug their way across the Atlantic. There's Tony Hertz-Hollingsworth, 'sapphire velvet sports coat with plum silk pocket square and matching tie (top button popped), white trousers knifepleated, two-tone wing-tips'. His wife of three weeks, Nicola, spots Frey and squeals 'Newcomer!' Everyone is a suspect, no one can escape, the parties simply must continue. Frey is a freeloader, having invited himself to dinner with the Cavendishes; they 'really are tall enough to write home about'. Such larks! There might be a murderer aboard, but surely one dead deckhand will not spoil the fun? As the Empress sails further away from Portsmouth, however, Schmitz confounds expectations. We are no longer in a jolly Agatha Christie novel, but perhaps in a film directed by Sam Peckinpah or Park Chan-wook. The corpses pile up, so many of them that they spill out of the kitchen where Inspector Daniels directs them to be stored. The parties take on a desperate air and the pace of the novel slows. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion The violence of the crossing is mirrored by the back-stories of the characters, which, as they emerge, form a collage of the waning British Empire and its brutal legacies. Through the lives of the toffs, the musos, the waiters, the bodyguards and sundry passengers and staff, we traverse the Commonwealth and witness dispossession, genocide, enslavement and all manner of violence and hypocrisy, returning again and again to the charnel houses of the Great War. These flashbacks are heavy-going and mighty didactic, as if Schmitz suspects his reader risks – like the cast and crew of the Empress – being so taken with the froth and frocks as to be indifferent to the bloody truths they conceal. It's not giving anything away to say that the reader twigs to who is responsible well before the poor old ship's detective does. We might grasp for a neat motive to explain the crimes but soon enough realise that any such reckoning is inadequate. Schmitz cues us to see the psychotic violence of The Empress Murders not as the work of an individual but as the expression of nothing less than history itself (let the band play on). The narrative machinery of The Empress Murders is unusual, in that the novel is narrated in part by the boat. The boat-narrator speaks not just in the voice of the Empress of Australia, but an armada of boats. The Empress is a bark canoe, a trireme and an ocean liner, an unsinkable boat with a commanding narrative position. Schmitz uses this device sparingly, staying mostly in a cozy close third and ventriloquising his characters; as boat, he addresses his readers directly. I'm not sure this very conspicuous narrative device is strictly necessary, but it is a measure of Schmitz's aesthetic ambitions for his novel, which are aligned with the avant-garde techniques of the first decades of the 20th century. The poet Frey is obsessed with Dada, and so, I think, is Schmitz, whose approach to narrative design rests heavily on jump cuts and collage, on startling juxtapositions and stomach-turning shifts in register. It is through the boat that Schmitz delivers an ominous thesis about history: 'Within my names within names, my kernel has always included Death Barge. Whether you believe in me or not, I've always been ready to ferry you to annihilation.' This is no pleasure cruise. By this stage of the novel, the reader has abandoned all hope of returning to the soothing rhythms of the jaunty nautical murder mystery. In terms of genre, we have been blindfolded, spun around three times and given a shot of brandy. Is it farce? Is it genius? Is it a bit? The reader is left with little choice but to stumble on and let the boat do its thing. Schmitz wants to entertain his readers, and also to provoke them. His characters are delightfully loquacious – ribald wits, most of them – and even the sullen ones are daubed with charisma. What it's all for is another matter. Is The Empress Murders a pulpit for Schmitz to rail against the abuses of empire past and present – or is it an improv stage? Is it a grand dissertation on history – or an experimental frolic? Are we being instructed to reflect on the past, or to look around at our annihilating present with fresh eyes? The answer to these questions is: all of it, and more. This is a novel that wants to be everything; it's stuffed to the gills not just with corpses but with language, with games, with gorgeous costumes and period details. The effect is overwhelming. But as Schmitz and the Dadaists and a thousand cabaret artists know, aesthetic derangement is a fit response – perhaps the only appropriate response – to a senseless and cruel world ferrying itself towards destruction. The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz is out now (Allen & Unwin)
The Australian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Australian
The Empress Murders is a new novel by a talented young actor and writer, Toby Schmitz
More than a decade ago, actor and playwright Toby Schmitz wrote a play called Empire: Terror on the High Seas about a murder spree on board an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. It was set in 1924, the year of the British Empire Exhibition in London, where one of the most popular features was an exhibit called Races in Residence designed to show off the conquered peoples of the empire. One theatre reviewer noted that the 'fall of the victims mirrors the tumbling of the British Empire in the mid 20th century' while speculating that the dense and incident-packed play might work better as a novel. Schmitz appears to have taken the suggestion on board, turning his play into a novel and renaming it The Empress Murders (after the ocean liner, Empress of Australia). The new title is a nod in the direction of Agatha Christie but readers expecting to snuggle up with a bit of Miss Marple-style cosy crime will be in for a shock. The Empress Murders is a violent book: nobody here is dispatched with a nip of arsenic in their camomile tea. Victims are flayed, mutilated, eviscerated and impaled. The bumbling ship's detective, Inspector Archie Daniels, is up to his copper's ears in gore. Daniels suspects the killer might be the so-called London Bleeder, who has been committing gruesome murders all over Greater London, 26 bodies at last count. 'Sometimes a clean kill, strangled, slit, poisoned, sometimes an abhorrent mutilation or perversion. Sometimes a mocking message left, sometimes nothing but maggots already at play'. Coded telegrams from his boss at Scotland Yard advise 'no Bleeder activity in London since embarkation', confirming the inspector's hypothesis that the Bleeder is on board the Empress. But is he a passenger or a member of the crew? Most of the action takes place in first class, and the author holds little back in depicting the malignant racism, boorish manners and entitled indolence of the toffs as they drink and screw their way across the Atlantic. Schmitz has certainly done his homework in the fashion mags of the day: 'Nicole Hertz-Hollingsworth … skips over in patent Mary Janes, periwinkle argyle socks, purple heritage tartan knickerbockers, a champagne silk blouse with black satin bow (top button popped).' Tony, her repellent – and cuckolded - husband of three weeks, is in 'sapphire velvet sports coat with plum silk pocket square and matching tie (top button popped), white trousers knife-pleated, two-tone wing-tips'. Does the story need this intricate sartorial detail? Probably not, but Schmitz's careful cataloguing of upper-class white privilege steers us towards the novel's central themes of racism and class warfare. His inventories of wardrobes and jewellery boxes mimic the mental inventories drawn up by members of the ship's crew as they plot to separate the toffs from their valuables. As an actor, Schmitz has appeared in Tom Stoppard's ultra-clever play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and there is more than a whiff of Stoppard's ingenious word-games in The Empress Murders, and of his verbosity: Some readers might find themselves skipping over such passages, overstuffed as they are with background detail, and by the author's own admission they won't miss much by doing so. The novel itself sometimes feels overstuffed, with superfluous characters as well as words, but once the murders start happening it doesn't take Schmitz long to whittle down his cast to a more manageable size. If the lurid violence of the murders functions, at one level, as an analogy of the violence of empire, it also mirrors the violence of the First World War, from which nearly all the book's characters emerge damaged, either by having taken part in it or, in some cases, by having missed it. The war scenes contain some of the novel's most graphic and visceral prose, the overwriting validated by the atrocity of the subject: Somehow Schmitz manages to hold the novel's disparate elements together, skewering a world debauched by wealth and war and empire while keeping the reader guessing about the outcome of his nautical murder mystery. Even a few short chapters narrated in the voice of the ocean liner make a crazy kind of sense as the first-class passengers guzzle gin and squabble about Dada in the ship's cocktail lounge. (Tom Stoppard's parody of Dadaism, Travesties, is another of Schmitz's acting credits.) The penultimate chapters are suitably cataclysmic, like a Jacobean tragedy in which the stage ends up covered with corpses. By the end the novel had won me over, Schmitz's clever but sometimes show-offy prose giving way to something quieter as two Irish lighthousekeepers ponder the final telegram messages sent by the Empress of Australia. It's a book that will leave you thinking. Tom Gilling is an author and critic. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Toby Schmitz is a writer, director and actor. He was most recently seen on television in Boy Swallows Universe and on stage in Gaslight. He has received nominations for his performances in The Seagull, Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. His television credits include The Twelve and Black Sails. He is also a celebrated playwright. His plays include Degenerate Art, I Want to Sleep With Tom Stoppard and Capture the Flag. He was awarded the Patrick White Award for his play Lucky. Arts News from the book world from literary editor Caroline Overington. Review Famed pieces from Monet, Renoir and Degas are going to become frequent fliers by making their second global crossing from Boston to Melbourne for this NGV exhibition.
