A confronting play about the climate crisis, as a glaciologist returns home to her mother and daughter to find her personal world melting.
If you walked into a kitchen and were confronted with a taxidermy albatross you would get a bit of a shock. The characters in this play all feel strongly about the bird in various ways, as it sits accusingly next to the sink.
In Albatross by Martha Loader, in the Menagerie Theatre Company’s production, the eponymous stuffed bird is a gift from Martin (Patrick Morris) to his new girlfriend Eve (Agnes Lillis), whose kitchen the play is set in. They’re planning a cruise to Antarctica and are all loved up, flirting with each other by means of reciting the different cuisines that will be on board the ship (I didn’t know ‘omelette station’ could be said so flirtatiously.) Into this scene of domestic bliss comes Alice (Caroline Rippin), the daughter of Eve, returning from her research trip in…Antarctica. All boats lead there, including the polluting cruise liners.
Alice is all wrapped up in her wintery gear, and as wrapped up in her work as a glaciologist, at one point explaining the collapse of an ice shelf due to climate change through upending a tub of ice-cream. Her relationship with Eve is strained, due to the demands of her work taking priority over her own daughter, who Eve cares for when Alice is away. As the play goes on, more and more hurt surfaces between the two.
The play beautifully explores the complexity of motherhood – the guilt when you are an absent parent and the equally painful regret when the role takes away your own separate future. Lillis is particularly moving in her wistful mentions of her brief career as a dancer – in the throwaway phrases there is a whole world of well-trodden thoughts of longing.
Rippin and Lillis portray the dynamics of interweaving love and hurt with nuance, creating a convincing bond of mother-daughter love. However, there are moments when the dialogue felt a little forced, and the overlapping was slow, leaving half-finished phrases hanging weightily in the air.
Their relationship is a microcosm for tension between those at the frontline of the climate crisis and those turning a blind eye to the severity of it. Rippin shows the barely concealed frustration of someone who sees the real-world impact on a day to day and returns from the silence of icy wastes to an even more silent society.
However, in her writing Loader demonstrates the nuance within the situation – Alice has a job that has raised her to the middle classes, whereas Eve is struggling with the reality of working-class life in the UK, managing day to day, accusing Alice’s preoccupation with the climate above all else as ‘privilege’. Loader also prevents the play from becoming a doom fest through the moments of humour which Morris’ direction makes the most of, as well as the underlying love that never remains overshadowed for too long. The play merges the political urgency of the crisis with the domestic in a way that reminds us how the climate crisis is not something happening ‘over there’, but relevant to the lives of every single one of us.
Albatross is at the Omnibus Theatre until the 30th May. Tickets available here: https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/whatson/albatross