They are eco marvels but they are fast disappearing. Sophie Hunter explains why she is using film, music, a few tonnes of salt and a reimagined wife of Lot to sound the alarm
Eerie, desolate wastes in old novels, salt marshes are still seen as flat, grey and inhospitable landscapes today. Rainforests, meadows, oceans and even peatlands have their celebrity champions. But now there is someone to speak up for the magnificence of the tidal marsh: Sophie Hunter, theatre-maker and opera director, hopes her new performance installation will make us take more care of these crucial, carbon-sequestering coastal guardians.
A salt marsh doesn’t attract attention, perhaps because not much seems to happen in these expanses of grass and creek. “And then it disappears twice a day, which is extraordinary,” says Hunter, sitting miles from any marsh in a north London pub, visibly refreshed after her return from her traditional family holiday, swimming, sailing and savouring the salt marshes of a location she asks me not to reveal, with her husband, Benedict Cumberbatch, and their three sons. “Salt marshes are the last wild places in the UK. These liminal intertidal spaces have often been associated with outcasts, people living on the fringes of society. How can we shift our perception to realising how much value they have on so many levels?”
