A short essay for the Wire Magazine exploring how Katie Mitchell, Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson’s play Cow | Deer brings us closer to the lived experience of animals through listening.

The only performers on stage for the 60 minutes or so of Cow | Deer are four Foley artists. They work expertly with an array of objects positioned on or around a row of bales of straw to evoke the experiences of a heavily pregnant cow and a year old roe deer over the course of one day in early August 2025. Using – among many other things – raffia, gardening gloves, film core bobbins, chamois leathers, and bags of cornflour, they describe the brush of warm animal bodies against undergrowth, the flap of ears, panicked hooves on tarmac, and a ruminant chew. This is accompanied by field recordings and subtle sound design to situate the events in farm and woodland, with human activity hinted at by unintelligible distant speech, crunching footsteps, or the flight of a plane overhead. There is no anthropomorphism. The animals are not unlikely friends. They occupy their inscrutable animal worlds and do their authentic thing.