'We spent a week on the cow birth!' The eye-opening play about animals with sound effects instead of words

Cow | Deer gets 'between the ears' of animals, creating mouse noises with polystyrene balls and comparing wild creatures with industrialised ones. So if there's no dialogue, what did its writer do? Director Katie Mitchell reveals all'I'm really into cow farming," says Katie Mitchell. It seems an unexpected interest for one of Europe's most rigorous, eco-conscious theatre directors. But she was "brought up in the 1970s self-sufficiency movement, in the Brecon Beacons", and now has "a little place in Wales, opposite a cow farm".Mitchell is talking dairy farming in a dressing room in London's Royal Court theatre. We're sitting with sound artist Melanie Wilson and playwright Nina Segal, her collaborators on a radical wordless project, Cow | Deer, which goes "between the ears" of its title characters. Tucking into Ottolenghi takeout during a rehearsal break, they describe how they are putting animals at the play's centre and making sound its medium. Continue reading...