A Sleepwalk on the Severn

TaurusVoice Theatre Company
The Space, Lansdown, Stroud
Friday, May 1st

TaurusVoice’s production of A Sleepwalk on the Severn, Alice Oswald’s theatrical poem commissioned by Gloucestershire County Council for the 2009 Severn Project Festival, which premiered at The Space on May 1st, is a riveting, extraordinary show, which will be touring the county over the next two months.

Oswald’s poem celebrates the Severn and all that it has sucked in over the centuries, all the noises, people, creatures and ghosts that surround it. She has listened carefully to the water, the wind, to the people that populate the river at night, now and in the past and charts the way the moon affects them. Director Jo Bousfield and composer Pete Rosser have listened equally attentively to the poem and created a visual and aural feast to augment her verse.

The actors, working in tight, tidal rhythms, wash around each other wonderfully, their faces and voices in perfect, lunar (and sometime looney) harmony. They recreate the un-silence of the river with chattering, sucking, squeaking and wailing noises that drive the words forward, and, when speaking in choral harmony, raise hairs on the back of the neck.

It is a very active dreamscape they create out of the tides of Oswald’s words, taking in the mythic symbolism of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, the raucous imaginings of Under Milk Wood and an earthy sense of Gloucestershire’s people and river. If there is one problem on the opening night, it is that the words of the songs are sometimes drowned out by the music – a shame when the words are so vital.

But one could smell the River Severn in the theatre – on the rain-swept hair of the audience and in the imaginations of the cast.

Review first published in the Stroud News & Journal