If I warm to Richard Bean's new play, it is because it defies all the rules of modern drama. It runs three hours rather than the standard 90 minutes. It covers the period from 1914 to today. And it is set on a Yorkshire pig farm rather than a rundown housing estate. Even if Bean's abundance leads to dramatic excess, it is a price well worth paying.
Bean's unfashionable aim is to pay tribute to our supposedly featherbedded farmers; and if one character holds this rural saga together it is one called William. We first see him as a 19-year-old, competing with his sibling for the right to go to war in 1914. By the time he returns as an amputee, he is driven by the idea of turning the 82-acre family farm into a pig factory. Prodigious success in the 1950s, however, turns into debt-crippled failure in the modern over-regulated world, and William ends up as an embittered, but still pugnacious, centenarian.
What comes across clearly are the multiple pressures to which Britain's small farmers are historically subject. Edicts from the ministry in 1944 to produce corn rather than meat or milk later turn into battles with the European Community overfactory farming. There is also class conflict, with the landed gentry embodied by a dilettante squire who ends up owning the feed company that dictates terms to the small farmer.
But what animates Bean's play is his delight in rustic eccentricity, and his prize specimen is a looming Yorkshire pigman called Titch who comes close to stealing the show. Memorably played by Adrian Hood, he is a blunt-spoken fanatic who occasionally finds sexual solace in the company of pigs and who regards them as intelligent but not too clever. "Just enough," as he says, "to mek it interesting but not enough to get yer worried."
Even if Bean's final scene bangs home the play's pro-farming message, the evening is held together by Wilson Milam's production and by a set of vigorous performances. Ageing over 90 years, Matthew Dunster conveys the peppery dedication of William who has sacrificed his life to bringing home the bacon. Sian Brooke as his equally dedicated niece and Dickon Tyrell as the gentleman squire are equally impressive, and one emerges from faintly exhausted but a lot wiser about country life.
· Until October 1. Box office: 020 7565 5000
