In some ways an anthology of sorts, Estelle Phillips’s The Trapped Doe is a theatrical vehicle for short stories inspired in some shape and form by Man’s relationship with nature. Possessing characteristics of an audio-visual installation in an art gallery or museum, the photographic vignettes that the audience are introduced to give a flavour of the natural world that inspired the show and are shown in conjunction with Phillips’s ‘spoken word’ delivery.

The eponymous story opens the show (and probably my favourite of the evening). It is often said ‘the Devil is in details’, but in the case of this segment, it really is the nuanced attention to detail that fires the imagination and immerses the audience in the events. While the story, as you might guess, contains a narrative about a trapped doe, what the story really conveys is Man’s kinship with animals, with an unspoken understanding between them.

Isaac Gullivers’s Buzzard: Known in his day as ‘the gentleman smuggler’, Isaac Gulliver made his mark on much of Dorset, with many places names after him. As you might expect, Gulliver was wanted by the law and had to use ingenious means to engender evasion. But it is a chance encounter with a kite (of the bird of prey variety) and a murder of crows that reminds Gulliver to never ‘surrender’ and in the words of Dylan Thomas, ‘do not go gentle into that good night’.

The appearence of white stags has always been deemed special, if not ‘magical’. In The Orphaned Fawn, the third story of the evening, Philipps intertwines the familiar and the ‘mundane’ with regards young animals needing the care of humans, and inserts allusions in language with themes in Greek mythology.

With a title like The Headless Horseman, one would be forgiven for thinking that it is in reference to the Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow. Instead, it pertains to an event that took place many centuries ago, an event tinged with doomed romance and unresolved trauma. Arguably the strongest story (after The Trapped Doe), it reminds the audience of the potency of ancient stories (whether they are true or not) and their power to comment on the present. The fact is local rural history is replete with such examples, but sometimes it takes the Arts to reintroduce these gems to a wider audience.

© Michael Davis 2024

The Trapped Doe ran at the Etcetera Theatre on 10th and 11th January.