I'm not sure the Somerset tourist industry will be rushing to endorse Nell Leyshon's second play which is set in and around a West Country cider orchard. But, even if Leyshon's dilapidated farm offers pretty cold comfort, her play has a dark poetic intensity that augurs well for her theatrical future.
Admittedly the first act is filled with the smell of cider apples and unanswered questions. We are in a decrepit farmhouse kitchen where 70-year-old Irene morosely grieves over her husband's death the night before. She is curt with her simple-minded brother Len, mildly tolerant of her son Roy and bitterly cruel to her estranged daughter Brenda. Only in the second act, set in the apple-strewn orchard after the funeral, do we begin to understand the source of the family traumas. Above all we realise that Irene has, to Brenda's dismay, crippled her son's sexual and emotional life with quasi-incestuous fervour.
Leyshon certainly takes her time and places too much reliance on withheld information to manufacture suspense. And unlike Richard Bean in Harvest, she never gives us the economic detail to explain the farm's precipitous decline.
But what she does convey, remarkably well, is a mood of rural repression and the sense of a family still in the grip of primitive myths and superstitions that might have come straight out of JG Frazer's The Golden Bough. And Leyshon skilfully opposes the abundant fertility of nature with the emotional sterility of wrangling rustics haunted by past grievances.
Lucy Bailey's production also faultlessly captures the mood of creeping decay. Mike Britton's sloping, earth-filled set has a severe, Starkadder-like gloom. Anna Calder-Marshall's Irene, pottering around in cardigan, nightdress and wellies, is also both possessive monster and implicit victim of dark, paternal desires. And both Helen Schlesinger as her reviled daughter and Peter Hamilton Dyer as her inhibited son reveal the cost of her maternal ferocity. But the most touching performance comes from Alan Williams who lends Lena child-like curiosity and delight in the simplest tasks such as bagging fallen apples. Even by the end many questions about the family's past remain unresolved. But Leyshon effectively punctures pastoral myths and shows the Somerset countryside to be a place filled with dark fears and ancestral guilts.
· Until November 12. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
