REVIEW: Albatross at Omnibus Theatre 26 – 30 May & touring
‘... a rocket ride through awkward family conversations, stepdads and mothers who are forced to choose between careers or their children’ ★★★
A scientist slams a tub of ice cream on her mother’s kitchen table in an angry tantrum. A description of how and why glaciers are melting due to surface meltwater follows but is lost on its audience. Prepare to be reminded, empathetically might I add, that a climate crisis is upon us during this work.
Award winning playwright, Martha Loader, fills Albatross with such quirky arguments fuelled by climate anxiety and produces a rocket ride through awkward family conversations, stepdads and mothers who are forced to choose between careers or their children.
Albatross is Loader’s fifth play and has reached its destination at the Omnibus Theatre in Clapham. Her work has seen national and international stages, won a Judges Award at the Burntwood Prize for playwrights, and she has recently picked up the George Devine Prize in 2025. It’s quite a collection; I’m sure you would agree.
But her new play, though brimming with excitement, scientific theory and niche spiritual superstitions, just misses the bullseye.
Based symbolically and rather loosely upon Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the play centers on the relationship between Eve and Alice. The former a stay-at-home grandmother and the latter her absentee daughter who constantly are at battle.
Eve (Agnes Lillis), forced to look after her grandchild meets Martin (Patrick Morris), a divorcee, who had a large family stunt of his own, and she falls for his promises of taking her to Antarctica on a cruise.
When Alice (Caroline Rippin) returns from the same place on a geographical experiment to save the ice bergs and, in her eyes, prevent global warming all by herself — whilst leaving her kid behind — well expectedly, chaos ensues.
At first, it's difficult to see why Coleridge, the formidable but largely forgotten romantic poet, appears pasted as a prelude to the script. My best guess is it’s something to do with the insinuations of climate activism which many find his most famous poem but correct me if I’m wrong.
For it’s the actors who keep the play on four wheels through bringing a studied but fluid and at best spontaneous spirit to each of their respective characters.
Patrick Morris, though for the most part playing a sidelined stepdad just nodding away through the arguments like a placid dog, appears as a considerable thespian in his quiet ability to play a character who really hasn’t much to say. Instead, he prefers to present himself through a taxidermic albatross, his slightly strange choice of gifts for his 64-year-old sweetheart, Eve.
The two women are frankly a formidable tour de force, dealing with some of the quirks of the script and sometimes repetitive dialogue with great skill.
Menagerie Theatre certainly knows how to produce a play and the set design, even if a little purposely wonky, alongside the lighting/projection magic, plays a considerable part in the work’s success.
A couple of issues present themselves with the ending that feels jilted and bizarre. I’m all for an abstract projection of the ice caps playing on the back curtain, even if it feels like it should be narrated by Greta Thunberg but, its symbolism felt too complex and was only truly grasped a while after the play had finished.
Overall, it’s a worthwhile piece that plays upon the heart strings whilst providing a brain freeze with scientific facts at the same time. We must look forward to seeing Loader at the Almeida, the Mercury Theatre and BBC Voices programs I hear.
Photography: Ashley Day
Menagerie Theatre Company presents: Albatross
Written by Martha Loader | Directed by Patrick Morris
NATIONAL TOUR 28 April – 23 May
LONDON Omnibus Theatre, 26 – 30 May
BOX OFFICE https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/whatson/albatross
