Urban life shields us from nature. Yet nature has a way of slipping through the cracks. When Mara Allen’s Olivia, a well-spoken London professional, loses a child, she can’t escape flesh-and-blood reality. The experience is primal and no amount of middle-class luxury can protect her from that.
As it happens, in Lorna French’s two-hander for Pentabus and Theatre by the Lake, she has family connections to a Shropshire farmhouse where she takes refuge. Here, she starts to make sense of her bereavement in a place where the cycle of life, death and, crucially, rebirth is more apparent. We see her loss in the context of a fox’s attack on a nest or a gamekeeper’s nurture of pheasants for blood sport. Bad things happen.
And bad things have a knock-on effect. The gamekeeper concerned, Stuart Laing’s Matty, has allowed the tensions of his job to spill into his private life. Taking the actions of animal rights activists personally, he has turned his anger towards his son, who is less interested in taking up the family business than in finessing the art of baking.
Matty’s gruff homophobia suggests he is the only man never to have seen Billy Elliot, his old-school intolerance at odds with his sensitivity elsewhere. But, like Olivia, whose trauma has pushed her away from her husband, he has allowed an emotion he can barely articulate to disrupt his domestic relationships. The movement of the play is not just from death to renewal, but also from division to reconciliation.
Plenty of material, then, for a 70-minute play, especially when coupled with a late-developing theme about Oliva’s experience as a black woman in a predominantly white rural community.
But in Elle While’s ponderous production, the night-time conversation between Olivia and Matty rarely convinces. She is inexplicably belligerent towards him. He is oddly tolerant of her. At different points, each turns a shotgun on the other, but neither seems to mind. Are they always being held up by moonlight? And why don’t this mismatched pair just walk off into the night?
The emergence of a puppet curlew from Charlie Cridlan’s blanket-strewn set is charming but it would carry more emotional weight if we had fewer questions.
Jacaranda is at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, until 13 November, then touring until 27 November.
