Bird Pie

Corpus Playroom, 8th-12th November, 9.30pm, £5-6

Dir. Abigail Rokison

[rating:2/5]

A couple of scenes into Simon Ryle’s musical, Tad Fluellen (Iwan Davies) opines, ‘Really, memory’s a strange thing.’ For once, this stumblebum DCI might be on to something.

I found myself thinking something similar when, at the play’s close, I clutched at fleeting recollections of an operatic psychoanalyst, a family of talkative corpses and an unfunny piss-take game show entitled Eight Out of Ten Birds. But my attempt to make sense of the past hour-and-a-quarter proved fruitless. Like a weird dream or a night out after The Mahal, in retrospect, nothing really seemed to add up.

Photographs by Max Liu

It was the script, not my memory, that was mainly to blame. The opening scene – four bloody corpses strewn haphazardly across the stage – foretells a conventional murder mystery. But Ryle’s musical isn’t content to limit itself to the cosy confinements of whodunit. It also tries to tackle battery farming, incest, media corruption, drugs, psychology and much, much more.

Needless to say, the result not only lacks focus, it also has no discernible plot. A mother’s suspicion that her satanic child is guilty of massacre smacks reassuringly of We Need To Talk About Kevin. However, just as the audience’s interest is piqued, this is abandoned in favour of the incoherent ramblings of an incongruously Welsh policeman.

There was also clumsiness. A misrepresentation of Radio 4 won’t, I’m afraid, go unnoticed by an audience of Cambridge students, weaned on The Today Programme and Just a Minute.

But it was the music that really wrecked the evening. Tonally, the standard of singing was in fact quite high. But nothing could mitigate the cringeworthiness of the policemen duet’s attempt to fit, ‘the schizo sister’s guilt looked/ relatively clear’ to the tune and rhythm of Any Dream Will Do, or the warbling of ‘I’m really not sure she’s taking her med-i-ca-tion!’ by bespectacled therapist Dr Dubion (Catherine Shaw).

What’s worse, these mortifying melodic interludes sacrificed moments of potential poignancy. In a defiantly dignified performance, Charlie Merriman was often captivating in the role of the psychopathic brother, Jacob. In a gripping monologue, he recounted a childhood visit to his father’s battery farm that culminated in ‘puking his guts out’. Such a speech deserved to be given some space. Instead, we were whizzed straight into the final number.

Though lacking coherence, Bird Pie certainly doesn’t lack ambition. In fact, there are glimpses of method – or at least of literary acumen – in the madness. One line – ‘I loved Rachel. Forty thousand brothers couldn’t love her like I do’ – neatly alluded to not only the (forty-thousand-strong) chicken farm, but also to the incestuous nature of Jacob’s passion for his adopted sibling, and, interestingly, to Hamlet. The eerie chicken-clucking that occasionally echoed round the playroom was also chillingly atmospheric.

The cast also deserve credit for their valiant effort. In fact, Merriman’s wasn’t the only noteworthy performance. Though DCI Tad Fluellen and PC June Biggs (Elizabeth Schenk) struggled to invest their characters with any credibility, Rochelle Thomas brought pathos to the role of Jacob’s sweet-natured girlfriend, whilst Georgina Terry gave a cogent – if somewhat actressy – performance as Rachel Crowe.

But all in all, it wasn’t an evening I’d wish to repeat. Even if I had enjoyed the comedic music – and at least one person in the audience was laughing heartily throughout – Bird Pie would still have failed to make satisfying watching. It just had too many ingredients.