“SALT”, Perth Theatre

Mark Brown on Tayside
20 September 2025
★★★★

The purpose of Great Yarmouth-based drama company Contemporary Ritual Theatre (which was founded in 2022) is embedded in its name. Under its writer-director Beau Hopkins, the company seeks to create a theatre that weaves human ritual (which is simultaneously physical, musical and primal) through its dramatic narratives.

Mylo McDonald as Man Billy.
Photo credit Peter Morgan.

Its current production SALT – an ostensibly modest three-hander set in a Norfolk fishing community in 1770 – is a fascinating and ambitious example of their work. Hopkins is a poet as well as a playwright, a fact that is reflected in a pungent, atmospheric script that seems to combine the bleak, visceral power of the Old Testament with the complex, humanistic poetics of William Blake.

The geographical thinking of fishing communities is, by necessity, coastal. Consequently, the fishing people of Norfolk have, historically, been more connected with seafaring communities in such far-flung places as Shetland (where the Scottish leg of this British tour began) and Aberdeen than with people working the land closer to home.

In the play, Man Billy (performed by Mylo McDonald) is, on account of his predilection to violence, refused the longed for adventure of taking off to Norwegian or Scottish waters with the men of the village. The son of a fisherman who is believed to have been the victim of a revenge killing, he suffers the indignity of staying home with his mother, Widow Pruttock (Emily Outred), carrying out subsidiary tasks connected with the landing of the catch.

The characters live a hand-to-mouth existence dominated by a dark, instinctive Christianity. A hated outcast, Widow Pruttock talks of her fellow fisherwomen with a toxic mixture of malicious gossip, superstition and ingrained misogyny.

All of which come into play when her son develops a brutish, compulsive fascination with the mysterious, almost ethereal Sheldis (Bess Roche). Cross one of Macbeth’s witches with a feminised Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a fecund, sensual sheela na gig from medieval lore, and one might get something approximating this character.

Together, on a simple stage marked out by a circle of heavy rope, the three actors perform a daringly unconventional play that combines anthropological imagination, vivid folk theatre and excavated song (including sea shanties). SALT demands – and receives from its vigorous and accomplished ensemble – performances of considerable commitment.

The English dramatist and theatre theorist Howard Barker argues that the essence of tragedy is – not, as Aristotle posited, personal and social catharsis – but, rather, the seminal connection between sex and death. Hopkins would seem to agree.

Sexuality and mortality play in tandem throughout the piece. They are joined together in terms that are compelling in their brutality. There is raucous vitality and darkly comic sexuality in the dance and gesture that accompany such songs as ‘Bedlam Boys are Bonny’ and ‘The Devil and His Wife’.

Engrossing and seductive though it is, the piece isn’t perfect. Its unorthodox structure – which has more rhythm than momentum – does not give itself willingly to a running time of just over two hours (including interval).

This is a minor shortcoming, however, in an impressively audacious and original theatre work.

Touring until 30 October: https://contemporaryritualtheatre.org/