It’s a question worth asking: what might happen if the regions were to secede from an increasingly overcrowded London? Unfortunately, this new 45-minute play by Molly Davies not only doesn’t give itself time to sketch in enough of an answer, it also diverts into a less profitable area of inquiry: what might happen if the chickens were to rise up against their human overlords?
Davies was last seen at the Royal Court with a sharp-eyed play about pupil-led learning, God Bless the Child. Here, in this play for the company Eastern Angles, she returns to the East Anglian setting of her fine first play for the Royal Court, A Miracle. The time is the near-future. Emily, a teenage girl, dresses up as a witch, singing a beautiful folk song as she reconnects with the area’s traditions. Layla, returning to the area after an unhappy affair in London, gets a job in a supermarket as the district prepares for the Separation. Second homes will be confiscated, cockney vowels will be frowned upon, warns Benjamin Dilloway’s keenly separatist Harry, and locals must not eat too many chickens, since they will be needed for export.
If it all sounds a bit silly written down, Davies’s smart dialogue and Steven Atkinson’s pared-back production do a good job at first of selling us on these ominous events. The characters are nicely delineated and beautifully played: Beth Cooke as the big-eyed Layla; Josephine Butler as her supermarket superior; Dilloway as the man they have in common; Rosie Sheehy as Emily, feeling her way into witchcraft.
Yet what starts out intriguingly allusive never quite takes off. And the idea of nature rebelling — such as when it’s reported that foxes have gone south to team up with the weeds — is too close to Caryl Churchill’s equally short but more focused dystopian drama, Far Away. By the time it starts to resemble The Birds, too, with chickens reportedly coming into houses through the catflaps, this mix of the fanciful and the po-faced has become hard to take seriously.
Box office: 0131 560 1581, to Aug 30