Review: Albatross, Omnibus Theatre 

It’s hard not to feel the urgency of Menagerie Theatre Company’s climate-themed play, Albatross, when you’ve spent the week slow roasting under record breaking temperatures. 

Yet under the hood, the play isn’t about climate change. At its heart, Albatross is a touching family drama about motherhood and sacrifice. Playwright Martha Loader works with big ideas, presenting a discursive piece about the choices women are forced to make between their ideals and their family. The question is, can women have it all? Perhaps the answer is ‘something’s gotta give’ when it comes to women and their life choices.  

Eve (played marvellously by Agnes Lillis) and her new beau, Martin (Patrick Morris), are getting to know each other (very well) in the middle of the night when Alice (Caroline Rippen) unexpectedly arrives. The reunion starts off awkwardly and soon the accusations start flying.  

On one side is long-suffering Eve, who’s spent her entire adult life in the service of others. She just wants a holiday. Lillis plays her as an affable older lady, making her an easy character to sympathise with. She’s constantly feeding, cleaning, and fussing and inhabiting the entire space, her little kingdom if you will.  

On the other, is Alice, a glaciologist returning after months away in Antarctica. She’s morose and stressed about the impending climate crisis and funding issues that threaten to derail her research – a woman burdened by the weight of the world who also strongly believes she can make a difference. She just needs more time. Alice emotionally shuts down to manage the guilt of her absence, becoming as cold as the ice she studies. She always has a glass in her hand, as if a guest in her own home, and never fully seems to settle in the space. There are moments when the script risks flattening Alice into a one-note vessel for scientific information or as a bratty mouthpiece for climate activism. It’s hard to tell who she is beyond all the chat about her climate convictions.  

As the night wears on, the characters move around the unsettling set (cleverly designed by Chris Dobrowolski), which at first glance looks like a regular home. But something is just a bit off. The stove is tilted, and so are the kitchen cabinets and the sink, and there are signs of water damage from a recent flood. The linoleum flooring is partially torn and patchy, resembling floating sea ice. The house is in a state of slow decay, much like the world outside.  

Morris, who plays double duty as Director, makes excellent use of this strange, off-kilter space. He’s got a great eye for how to fill the stage and keeping the actors moving naturally so the story never feels overwrought. At times, when the script starts to become heavy, the tight direction keeps the characters real and grounded. And he injects plenty of humour into a piece that could easily take itself too seriously.  

Watching all of the drama from a corner of the stage, is the play’s namesake: a stuffed albatross, silent and judging. Recalling Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the albatross around the family’s neck is the guilt of never doing enough and never being enough. In recent years, warmer waters and depleting food sources have increasingly driven the usually monogamous seabirds to “divorce”. Even the birds, it seems, are not spared the relational fallout of climate change. In the end, Albatross offers no easy resolutions. There is no right or wrong, only what each person feels they must do for the greater good.  

Produced by: Menagerie Theatre Company 
Writer: Martha Loader 
Director: Patrick Morris 
Designer: Chris Dobrowolski  
Lighting Designer: Paul Bourne 
Composer & Sound Designer: Michaela Polakova 
Technical Stage Manager: Emma Chandler 
Marketing Associate: Sarah Saxby 
Dramaturgical Support: Steve Waters 
Lighting Consultant: Ashley Day 
Marketing Consultant: Karen Goddard  
Print Design: Geoff Shirley 
Filmmaker for trailer: Elena Morris-Gray 
Student Placement: Dimitra Filippa 

Albatross runs at the Omnibus Theatre until Saturday 30 May.