The Swallows

Here is a tale of a woman’s (Helen Morse) relation to Nature: her childlike immersion in it – mud between her toes, skin red from icy water - her delicate, wondering observation of nature’s variety, the sunlight through the trees, the sensual feel of a breeze on her skin, her awareness of its silence filled with sounds – birds hidden and seen, the rustle of leaves, the trickle-flow of water – all as she walks and jumps from rock to rock and explores along beside Innocence Creek…  Her own little vulnerable world.  And then the story tells of her losing that when it is built over and peopled and its sounds are lost in traffic and angry voices.

At the centre, when the creek is bult over or gone underground, the child, now an adult, lives in shabby flats beside or over what was the creek.  Her neighbour (also played by Morse) is an angry, possibly violent man, given to random acts of pointless vandalism.  His connection to the whole is his lack of connection.  There is irony here – and humour – beside the matter-of-fact resilience.  And there Morse’s landlady (Morse again), upset, close to panic because of the grass growing between the cracks in the concrete of her asset.  But we know that that grass is nature creeping back…

This all comes to us as a monologue spoken by Helen Morse – who has that quiet, riveting, magnetic presence.  She speaks softly but with such variation – wonder, happiness, dismay, sadness, and the prickling or tingling of new hope - that we attend to every word.  She carries us along through all the changes. 

With her story - and inseparable from it - is an intricate, detailed soundscape from Ria Soemardjo and Helen Mountfort.  There are hums and threnodies on stringed instruments and drums, and there are sounds that suggest or allude to the sounds of nature – birds, crickets, water - and there are the sounds of the all-conquering humans.  These sounds – composed and designed by Soemardjo with Mountfort’s collaboration - weave into and around and beside the spoken word so naturally that we simply accept them – but they can only be the result of thought, imagination and precise planning.  They are sometimes startling but never jarring; they are melancholy or bright or tender.