The Snow Goose

The Snow Goose puts a solitary painter in a disused lighthouse on a marsh, and a girl with nowhere else to be at his door, holding a wounded bird. Philip has kept away from people for years. Frith has decided the goose matters more than his preference for being left alone.

The bird recovers and returns each winter, and so does she. Over several years the two of them build something neither will name, in a country sliding into a war that reaches even the marsh in the end. When word comes that thousands of soldiers are stranded on a beach across the water and every small boat is needed, Philip takes his out.

Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie wrote the book, music and lyrics, adapting Paul Gallico's 1940 novella, and Marshall Pailet directs the first staging. The score is folk-leaning and spare, written for a small company, and the show keeps the scale of the story deliberately small: no battle is staged, and the war arrives as news, weather and absence. What it is finally about is a man who had decided people were not worth the trouble, and a child who proved him wrong.