‘Plucked’, The Bull

The small room that doubles as a makeshift theatre upstairs at The Bull pub in Wanstead was rather busy on the evening of 07/09/26. And what had drawn this host of people - so many so that organisers fretted about restricted views at the back of the room? It was the staging of Deborah Walliker’s latest play ‘Plucked’. Walliker is a notable actor and playwright with a series of accolades. This play is an adaptation based on the Greek Myth of Persephone and Demeter - to summarise this as best and as succinctly as I can with minimal spoilers; Persephone is captured by Hades and trapped in the underworld, and Demeter is her mournful mother. This piece of writing was not like the majority of recent adaptations of ancient Greek stories, a carbon-copy re-tellings of the myth, rather it was a delightfully different take on the story, a tender and thoughtful observation that by and large focused with intention on the emotional elements of the story.

Walliker is clearly a very skilled and purposeful writer who places great emphasis and responsibility on the humane sensory qualities of the written word. This play hones in on both the obvious emotive responses experience by our two central characters - such as grief, loss, dismay, fear - but also taps into the more subtle after-effects of the traumatic situation the two women have found themselves in, for example; the denial, avoidance, paranoia, and so on.

The play stars Carol Been as Demeter and Christina Rayner as Persephone. They are the only characters on stage and the actors enlivened their roles wonderfully. The pair never properly interact with each other in dialogue, instead each character follows their own monologue,  interjecting one after the other in brief snippets. As a result, the script feels fragmented and a bit jarring at times. This is, I suspect, Wallace’s desired effect. The pair are intrinsically connected, however, as mother and daughter with emotional, perceptive and introspective ties that will invisibly hold them together all their lives. Yet, as this monologue structure reveals, fate and context have torn them apart and now they struggle to reach each other or relate on any sort of level. Walliker’s text is sharp and poignant on this front, she has built the script in such a fine-tuned way you are just waiting for the monologues to align, to unify into a dialogue, for the pair to be re-united. The closest they get, however, is symbolic unification. For instance; as Demeter observes a crow catching its prey outside her window, Persephone recalls the moment she was trapped by Hades. The women also come to reach extreme emotional states at similar times - their voices heightening simultaneously into a crescendo as their pain reflects upon the other like a mirror.

The acting is flawless. Demeter is from the onset clearly disturbed - masking her true feelings by immersing herself into domestic tasks. Been’s characterisation of these avoidance tactics is perceptive and poised and her fragility is quite frankly harrowing. Rayner, on the other hand, effortlessly steps into the character of Persephone. First introducing us to a cheerful young woman with a love for music, she then leads us down the rabbit hole of devastation, destruction and chaos as she falls victim to Hades’ trap. Rayner also has a distinct gift for embodying the role of other characters and makes this play more dynamic as a result.

One of the strongest elements of this production, however, is its treatment and observation of women in Greek mythology. Typically female voices in these contexts have been relegated to background characters/side plots, with male stories generally being the crucial narrative anchors. Much less do traditional re-tellings of these myths even dare to shine a light on the female emotional journeys present in these stories. Here, Rayner and Been, making the most of Walliker’s empathetic and richly humane script, have brought to life these women with a palpable sense of wholeness. These feel like rounded, lived-in people as opposed to concepts crafted merely to provide structure or additions to male-centric storylines.

Where I would say this play risks faltering, however, is in Walliker’s occasional over-emphasis on the contemporary setting for this play. This is by no means a flaw in itself, and rather makes a lot of sense especially given this performance space where it can be difficult to stage historical adaptations. However, a lot has been deliberately modernised, I suppose to remind the audience that we are in the contemporary and to nudge this piece away from a typical adaptation of the Greek myth. This concept is a fine way to reconfigure an idea of the original story into relatable reality, but my fear is that at times the play feels like it could easily slip into domestic drama a la EastEnders. Everything - from the character names e.g. Persephone to Steph, Hades to Hayden, the language steeped in urban realism, to the modern locations - has been updated, and what this does is take the play further and further from the original history. What the script perhaps forgets is that people may not know the original story well and I think it is partly the responsibility of the play to relate it in a palatable way. But here this desire to bring it up-to-date meant too much of the original plot fell away, and it is often unclear what exactly is going on. I do feel that Walliker focussed intentionally on the emotional aspects of this ancient tale, but could do well to be a bit more wary of losing the anchoring narrative. This, after all, is what the audience is probably here to see and I think a more ambiguous approach to this modernisation would still have landed.

Walliker came out before the show to introduce the production in person - letting the audience know it is an original piece of writing within an original soundscape, and also that it would be script in hand and is a work-in-progress. The musical elements play a key role in the original story and definitely befitted the action and commentary, however, I cannot say I found the soundscape to be a noteworthy addition to this piece as a whole. The whole work-in-progress nature of the show was largely unnoticeable and you do often forget that the actresses are holding scripts. This is largely down to their raw talent for performance, but also the vivacity of the text itself. Of course, this did give the show a sense of un-readiness, but I dare say this was compounded by the warning that we received at the start. If it weren’t mentioned, maybe we wouldn’t have even noticed? The idea feels almost planted in our minds from the onset, so we were primed to pick up on it.

Finally, the props and lighting were starkly minimal but practically served a purpose. The main draw of this work being the emotional observations and gritty subtext. On the whole, this is an interesting re-interpretation of an ancient Greek story. Its modern contextualisation makes it feel sufficiently new in itself, but the boldest, most striking part of this show is Walliker’s creative choice to emotionally ground this work and explore these female voices in a holistic way. The premise definitely felt second to the sentiment - as though the sensory matters more over substance in this case. If you’re going into this play expecting a distinct focus on the actual myth of Persephone and Demeter, you might feel the emotional parts are drawn out and laborious. But in my case, I felt this was the most unique part of the play and gave it the most noteworthy merit. There really is some excellent writing here, albeit this is not so much storytelling, but rather social observation. Perhaps this will be sharpened up and re-configured to craft a better balance between the two, staying true to the story whilst also modernising and emotionally grounding it? As Walliker says, this is a work-in-progress, and I do feel there’s only good things to come.