A gently absurd ecofable where out-of-work scarecrows run a DIY radio station post-apocalypse.
Farm Fatale arrives at the Southbank Centre as part of a rare London visit from French theatre-maker Philippe Quesne, whose work is known for slow, dreamlike worlds that sit slightly to the side of our own. Here, the last scarecrows on earth, abandoned along with their fields, decide to fill the silence by starting a radio station. Asking what artists and eccentrics might do in the ruins.
The space is a high-ceilinged white box, spare and oddly cosy. Hay cubes hang from the ceiling and sit in tidy piles, a fake bird hovers overhead, sacks lean held up on ropes too, with projected text on the back wall, used to mark chapters like “The Band” and “The Farm”. The scarecrows shuffle in, padded and masked, their costumes and physicality blended artfully. They bring their tools with them: a keyboard strapped to a pig, microphones, bits of recording gear, a little satellite for sending their songs into the ether. The premise is heartbreakingly simple. Their farms have closed, for all the usual reasons, and in their redundancy, they’ve started a radio station.
A new scarecrow, Picochet, arrives fresh from environmental protest, still buzzing with the need to act. Quesne gives the group a strangely detailed culture. They shake their hands to express delight, recognition, agreement, and everything in between. Their voices are soft and amplified with effects, mic’ed and distorted sweetly, their movements somewhere between children’s television and ritual. Once I let their tempo set the terms, the atmosphere became surprisingly tender. The story meanders, but that feels the point.
One lovely sequence involves a meandering discussion about what to programme for next week’s show, which eventually becomes an interview with Magritte the bee. The interview is done through translation across languages, and is awkward, detailing the bee’s travels, eventually ending when a too intimate question is asked about Magritte’s new relationship with a mushroom and discoveries around bee sexuality. It is silly, but it also quietly presses on how humans treat other creatures as endlessly available for our curiosity, and what gets lost in translation. That double register, both light and resonant, runs through the evening.
The clowning and physicality are so tight, the ensemble so charming and openly honest. Music is woven through everything. Original songs sit alongside familiar covers, played with a relaxed assurance that delivers on vibes. The stage pictures keep shifting in small, precise ways: scarecrows clustered in a haystack choir, bodies swaying like they are at a very gentle rave, and a beautiful, chromatically vast moment at the end. Nothing is rushed or forced here. The pleasure is in watching the ensemble slowly come together and then fluidly move to the next moment and activity.
Beneath the whimsy sits a clear ecological anxiety. The scarecrows talk about pollution, monoculture, dying animals, the disappearance of birds (who they once tried to scare off), and the forms their resistance might take. One act of potential violence is framed as both joke and genuine ethical question – what has a real effect? Elsewhere, their warnings about environmental damage feel earnest and slightly hapless, which may be the most honest thing in the show: activists who care deeply and still get it wrong, and the dysfunction of a commune. Hopeless hope. The piece gestures to the tensions around property damage, animal liberation and “acceptable” forms of protest without fully digging into the mess, preferring a soft utopian glow.
Farm Fatale may divide audiences. Its pace is slow, its humour strange, its uncanniness specific, and its politics wistful. For me, though, the combination of clumsy care, musical play and dancing, and beautiful design added up to something quietly affecting and immersive. I left feeling refreshed and more easily able to engage with the topics raised because of their wholesome, unusual packaging. What remained afterwards is an atmosphere: scarecrows as late-stage broadcasters, trying to archive a broken world and still, somehow, imagining a gentler, less absurd one.