Irene's farmer husband has died suddenly and she's falling apart, like the apple farm where they lived together for 40 years. Estranged daughter Brenda reappears after a three-year absence, and before you can say Cox's Orange Pippin the family is out in the orchard feeling miserable, remembering happier days and shouting recriminations at each other.
Nell Leyshon's drama bagged itself several awards when it was premiered here in 2005. Now recast and heading out on a national tour, the play doesn't quite pack either the bite or emotional punch you might expect.
In truth, this is an old-fashioned something-nasty-festering-in-the-woodshed rural drama, lifted above the ordinary by Mike Britton's evocative design in which each rotting apple with its beautiful bruised name - Royal Somerset, Morgan Sweet, Ashton Bitter - symbolises fallen hopes.
Both play and production are at their best when they concentrate less on the histrionics and more on the mythic. You get a whiff of what this play might have been in a delicate final scene of such visual beauty and poignancy that it almost makes up for all the earlier shouting. It's a long time since anyone believed in all that Cider With Rosie nonsense about the countryside, but Leyshon's play subscribes to a few cold comfort myths of its own and even supplies a mad cow in the form of Irene (played by Veronica Roberts), a mother so intent on getting her own way that she has destroyed her son's future and her own.
The lack of sentimentality in Roberts' performance is admirable, but for the play to have resonance she, and the rest of her family, must command some sympathy. I wanted to murder them all.
· Until January 27. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
