Throbbing with sweaty sensuality, the summertime Somerset Levels setting of Nell Leyshon’s new play is filled with blades and blood, moonlit, swelling river waters and silvery eels ripe for mating.
Teenage Lily lives in a stifling all-male household with her handyman father Mervyn and grandfather Harold, as trapped as the helpless fly Mervyn finds caught in a window pane. Mortality hovers in the memories of the former family undertaking business and of her mother, whose death by drowning has condemned Lily to a sexually ambiguous domestic role. Harold, like a noisy baby bird, constantly demands to be fed; Mervyn, who has covertly embarked on a new relationship, expects her to run his household. But Lily has her own desires, yearning to explore her burgeoning womanhood.
Like Leyshon’s earlier Somerset drama Comfort Me with Apples, this work arrestingly evokes mood but is short on incident. Its meditative quality means that at times the weight of its symbolism threatens to crush the flimsy narrative structure. Mervyn’s sharp new girlfriend and his friend Kenneth, mesmerised by Lily’s flushed concupiscence, are underwritten.
But Lucy Bailey’s production oozes atmosphere. Nell Catchpole’s music shimmers like heat haze, and in Mike Britton’s design the water that flows around the house gradually rises to flood the entire stage. The acting is impeccable, with Laura Elphinstone as Lily blending adolescent stroppiness with piquant loneliness and the exultation of sexual awakening. Tom Georgeson, too, excels as the grumbling grandfather, embittered by the dependency of old age and revelling, as he strips the skin from an eel, in the recollection of white womanly thighs from which, in his heyday, he once peeled the stockings.
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We are all, Leyshon suggests, at the mercy of our animal urges. If that alone is insufficient sustenance for her drama, it’s the earthy stuff from which she and Bailey create a pungent hymn to the elemental in human, and mother, nature.
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