A rabbit is hit by a car and now lies injured on the road. A crow waits for it to become carrion, in order to consume it.
In a brave and laudable snub to trendy woke identity politics, writer and director Leon Ford casts humans in the animal roles.
As the titular rabbit and crow, Sophie Gregg and Justin Smith are brilliant. Philip Lynch is equally superb as another crow who later attempts to join in on the action. With enormous skill, they play Ford’s amusing script, finding the magic in every moment, and achieving both humour and pathos. (All you performers who identify as crows and rabbits, notice has been given. The days of lazily asserting you’re entitled to the role simply because you’re a bird or a small furry animal are over. From now on, you might have to try actually acting.)
The humour of the piece comes from various mechanisms. One is simple anthropomorphism. We delight in the conceit that the animals speak in our vernacular, display our peccadillos, and face very human problems. (It’s a vein of humour long mined by cartoonists. The artists working for The New Yorker, for example, have especially excelled in it.) It’s a genre that both gently mocks humankind, but also expresses joy at the non-human Other. (Who hasn’t been enchanted by the absolute amorality of cats?)
Another comic mechanism is dramatic irony. Neither the rabbit nor the crows understand human aspirations and human technology, but I suspect a small percentage of the audience do.
So, is it allegory, fable or just fun?
It certainly brings to mind Aesop and Orwell. But it also evokes the ancient Greek poet Archilochus and his claim “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In Ford’s 50 minutes of fun, it’s the crow who knows many things, who is an individualist, an opportunist, an obfuscator, a chancer. The rabbit knows one big thing: love.
You might argue that the tension between these two worldviews is a false dichotomy, that life is not simply a choice between the individual and the community, and that any such reductive binary belongs in a children’s book – but to quote someone with even greater moral authority than a theatre critic: “Unless you become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (And that allusion offers me a segue to a speech the rabbit gives concerning the afterlife; it’s a superb parody of eschatological wishful thinking.)
The other tension Rabbit & Crow plays with is that between choice and inevitability, between the things we can change and the things we can’t. Must crows eat carrion?
Perhaps the piece gets itself into a bit of a corner here. When much of the humour comes from the sense that the animals represent types, and when our overarching belief is that the animal world is utterly innocent because it’s without a moral dimension, the presentation here of an ethical dilemma might be hard to swallow (like road kill.)
But something else is on offer, or more accurately, not on offer. As the play doesn’t actually represent people, that is, specific human characters, we’re not offered the option to respond to it in the following, time-honoured, tired manner: This play is a criticism of all those people who claim they have no choice, when they indubitably do. This play is a criticism of all those people who resist moral progress, when they assert it’s against the “nature of things”. This play is a criticism of all those people who maintain the immutability of the “nature of things”, when they’re simply defending their own privilege. This play is a criticism of all those people who are not people like me!
Rabbit & Crow denies us this easy out, as the sheer playfulness of the script, and the magnificence of the performances, lifts it into universality.
Paul Gilchrist
Rabbit & Crow by Leon Ford
At Flight Path Theatre until March 8
Image by Philip Le Masurier
Theatre Red 