Katie Mitchell has been noticing that Foley art is a thing that exists, and building shows around it, on and off for years now. To be honest I probably wouldn't have booked
Cow Vertical Bar Deer, which Mitchell co-creates with Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson, if it hadn't been a co-production with the National Theatre of Greece and I'd not felt like being supportive. In the end it's not quite my cup of tea but didn't feel like a waste of my time either. The show is entirely wordless, with the cast of four responding to Wilson's pre-recorded soundtrack of animal and machine noises by using Foley techniques to create the rest of the sounds heard by the titular animals: A heavily pregnant cow in a field, and in a nearby wood a deer, whose levels of fecundity the informational postcard we're given at the start doesn't disclose.
