Writer and Director: Joe Graham
“It’s not brave if you don’t have a choice, it’s just survival.” Joe Graham’s new play The Murmuration of Starlings really does feel like a battle for audience survival, a strange and deliberately mysterious one-hour and 45-minute play that doesn’t give much away. There is some kind of threat, possibly mental health issues, lots of paranoia, and endlessly looping conversations about whether tomato soup is a drink or lunch.
The key to mystery writing, however, is anticipation and intrigue, creating questions and scenarios that the audience wants to know more about, but although every element of this show is geared towards generating that investment, it fails to spark our interest in what’s going on and why
The Man leaves his house as The Woman he lives with makes lunch. Outside, he meets The Boy watching the starlings, but who leads him to a bus stop, chasing a girl about a book and away from a mysterious “Him” who may be a predator. Back at the house, a knocking distracts them, and when The Boy leaves, The Man turns on The Woman when he fears the arrival of an alien.
Graham’s play borrows liberally from multiple genres; there is science-fiction and lots of references to horror-sci-fi films, mystery and disaster writing, and, later, hints of absurdism. In various ways, the two parts of the show don’t quite align. The first act is most difficult to follow as the character known as The Man goes through several cycles of the same behaviour, reliving or, at least, re-experiencing events while an unsatisfied paranoia grows. Graham introduces The Man, The Woman and The Boy in this first section, but without any clear characterisation or direction. Wherever the writer is leading us, the audience is not invited to understand where or why.
The second part of the show is a different tone altogether as The Boy and new character The Girl interact instead in overly long, winding conversations. A light romance begins with a meet-cute that ties in the bus journey from Act One, and a new time dimension to the play becomes clear. This is nicely aided by the uncredited costume design that has The Man and The Woman wear similar outfits to The Boy and The Girl with inverse colours, a subtle connection between them that makes sense. But having established this, Graham does nothing with it, and the play ends with no further mention of “Him,” why The Man is so disturbed by the outside world or what starlings have to do with anything that the humans have been up to.
Is this a play about mental health challenges, about the awfulness of the outside world or an attempted absurdist piece with a political meaning? Maybe no one knows. Steve Hay, Jenny Johns, Jonny Dagnell, and Jennifer Barton give confident performances, full of emotional extremes that suggest the actors perhaps understand what is meant to be happening. For the audience, it is a different experience; we may survive but remain baffled.
Runs until 14 March 2026
