Professor George Grey (Gemma Redgrave) is a leading zoologist, an expert in animal behaviour who has been recently widowed. She says, “there were three people in my marriage… Three people and twelve legs.” That third person was Frances, and twelve legs because Frances was an octopus, an octopus who was their subject of study and lived in a big tank in the sitting room of the campus accommodation.
If you are not already an expert on octopuses, you will learn fascinating facts about them in Marek Horn’s play as it explores ideas about sentience, religion, emotional dependence, mourning and academic responsibilities as it traces the changing dynamic between her and ambitious anthropologist Harry Giscard (Ewan Miller), whom she finds in her kitchen one morning expecting to move in. He too has a research project that involves not just Frances but George too.
Octopolis is stimulatingly cerebral but lucidly written. It is set mainly in the past but with passages in the present and in a future (that singular article is significant), those times identified by projected titles. It is written in a mixture of dialogue and narrative, beautifully blended, and interspersed with lively dancing to David Bowie’s music that adds an extra dimension and reflects the role Bowie plays in the intellectual argument about mythology and religion.
Gemma Redgrave and Ewan Miller are well matched as the sparring couple, charting the change from his offensive arrival to what seems a kind of empathy and something stronger (at times this can feel like a romcom). They bring a light touch to the play’s sardonic humour, gravity where needed and an occasional exuberance.
Ed Madden’s fast-moving production puts text first. Narrative actions often are not played out physically, and this is at one with not ever seeing Frances; even when Ewan dips an arm in her tank, it is an imaginary space in front of them, though Anisha Fields's simple setting of just a tired carpet is backed by a row of screens on which Jamie Platt’s lighting provides colour changes and flurries of movement that hint at what might be going on in it.
Octopolis takes its title from the name that a diver gave a place in Australia where he found two dozen octopuses living contingently. This group wasn’t an intended community but something like humans in a flat-share. George says its discovery sparked off the Greys' research into what she calls “interspecies cultural transfer”. Her research sought to discover things about communication among and across species, but Octopolis is as much about humans as about cephalopods.