It’s been nearly 30 years since this play by Caryl Churchill was last seen in London; watching this fine revival by Ria Parry, you wonder why we’ve had to wait so long. It is a startling, savage, cruel and passionate evocation of life in rural East Anglia, and the writing is as rich as the dark brown soil that dominates James Button’s design, alive with deep, twisted roots of history and superstition, and a very occasional green shoot of hope. With its references to the Common Market and the Falklands, it remains tethered to the political realities of its day, but its theatrical invention dazzles, even when the drama is at its darkest.
The agrarian and the domestic uncomfortably co-exist and overlap. A rectangular field studded with potatoes is bordered by grubby kitchen units. Everything is dirty, and when the earth is dug away, a layer of impenetrable steel lies beneath, suggestive both of the prison that these wide-open spaces have become to those who labour there, and of the modernity that will see the land pass from financially pressed families who have owned it for generations to big businesses.
In a kaleidoscope of short scenes, the ghosts of 19th-century farmworkers rub shoulders with modern women engaged in back-breaking toil, a landowner on the verge of selling up and a Japanese businessman with a voracious eye for the profit in this “beautiful English countryside”.
Locked into the foodchain of dependency and exploitation are the workers Val (Katharine Burford) and Frank (Alex Beckett). Their consuming love for one another offers respite from the drudgery — but comes at the unbearable cost of married Val’s separation from her children. And, in a close-knit community where gossip about bed-hopping is rife, and to be driven by despair to suicide is not uncommon, other relationships become horribly distorted, too: Val’s co-worker Angela (Nicola Harrison), maddened by a disappointing marriage when she had imagined country life would be “romantic”, vents her frustrations in sadistic torment of her stepdaughter.
Parry’s production is beautifully acted by a cast who glide between roles to embody Churchill’s array of characters, delineated in a few bold, eloquent strokes. The effect is terse, yet poetic, heart-breaking, but often wryly funny. Raw and remarkable.
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Box office: 0844 8471652; to Mar 26