The Minsk-based playwright Pavel Pryazhko is barely known in this country: save one rehearsed reading at the Royal Court in 2011, this is the first time his work has been seen in the UK. Anyone expecting the punky protest theatre of his more famous colleagues, Belarus Free Theatre, will be in for a surprise.
Pryazhko whispers about the tormented politics of his homeland instead of shouting. Set in an orchard that could be anywhere – and, indeed, any time – The Harvest is a deceptively simple tale of four young people and their increasingly frantic attempts to pick apples. Boxes break and the precious fruit gets bruised; the men jockey blokeishly for position, the women gossip and preen. Sexual tension flickers, then dissipates. Everyone swigs vodka. Nothing much happens, and everything.
The debts to Beckett and Ionesco in this mock-serious, semi-farcical tale are clear, but what makes Pryazhko’s voice distinctive is its sly Slavic wit and its sense of vacant menace. We never glimpse the orchard’s owners, nor get any inkling why this harvest is of such desperate importance, and perhaps it doesn’t matter: the play functions as well as an absurdist riff on the agricultural obsessions of socialist realism as it does as a parable about cheap migrant labour.
If we seem, in the end, to be stuck where we began, that may be the point.
Despite a tendency towards over-hearty slapstick, Michael Boyd’s hour-long production of Sasha Dugdale’s translation is clean and crisp. Madeleine Girling and Tom Piper’s elegant white-box set (which pays its own debts to Sally Jacobs’s renowned designs for Peter Brook’s 1970 A Midsummer Night’s Dream) is festooned with golden apples like a version of Eden designed by Prada; and the four young cast members capture well the doleful humour and quiet despair of the script. Pryazhko is a writer to watch: he knows how to leave the most profound things unsaid.
• Until 11 April. Box office: 01225 448844. Venue: Theatre Royal, Ustinov Studio, Bath.
