Mouse, written and directed by Alice Sparrow, is a story that starts with a curse. Gemma (Aimee Townend) has been transformed into a mouse for 364 days a year by a wizard (Harry Singh). The only way to break the spell is to have sex with somebody who truly loves her. Each year on her “human day”, she returns to her ex-girlfriend Cam (Alice Sparrow) in an attempt to get a shag. Their annual encounters become a fragmented retrospective of their former relationship, as well as an interrogation of love per se.
In many ways, Mouse is refreshing, with unexpected humour, and the story remains light enough to invite laughter while remaining teasingly intriguing for reflection, especially on those familiar patterns of sapphic relationships: messy, chaotic, resentful, injured, lonely, and ultimately craving love while being incapable of loving. The play cleverly explores these themes through the fragmented encounters after Gemma became a mouse, but we can easily reconstruct their earlier human relationship.
This relationship is also paralleled by her new relationship with a mouse, as a mouse. It does remind me of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where absurdity can go hand in hand with a hopeful line of escape. What does love mean when she is a mouse? What love can she produce as a non-human agent? What is ultimately the point of metamorphosis, if not to force us to revisit the whole concept of love, passion and desire?
Ideally, Mouse could have asked these questions. However, while Gemma and Cam’s sapphic relationship is full of detail, Gemma’s non-human existence and her interspecies romance are predictable and ordinary. There’s nothing destabilising in her transformation, nor is this unusual romance able to provide inspiring answers.
Mouse bears immense potential if executed as a more mature production. At the moment, it feels like a work in progress. Both actors have a natural instinct for landing punchlines, but the overall pace remains too flat, without a clear climax or focus. The scene transitions are also somewhat abrupt, with sudden soundtrack cut-offs. While many of the narrative turns feel unexpectedly funny and dramaturgically logical, some of the later developments, such as the wizard’s sudden proposal, seem too random, as if designed only to heighten the chaos and absurdity itself rather than serve the story as a whole.
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