University of Oxford Student Season: Michaelmas Term 2025

Presented by Tidal Theatre

By Rowan Brown

Brought to life through vivid physical theatre, avalanches of music and experimental stagecraft, Tidal Theatre’s Launa follows Edna, a young mother processing the loss of her daughter, Launa, a year after her death. Grief is a many-headed creature; sometimes unshaved armpits and supermarket flowers, sometimes earth-shattering implosions of memory, emerging like serpents from nests of dirty washing, sometimes a quietly childlike tender apparition, asking if she’d like to play.

Within the confines of her cluttered apartment, loss erupts amid the mundane: the unexpected chorus of a song, begging Edna to dance to its tune.

As the life Launa might have lived flickers in and out of focus, we ask how far relationships in the present are possible while Edna clings to the past. Yet, when silenced, to what lengths will grief go to make itself heard?