The discursive speechifying that’s often stalked Mike Bartlett’s intricate dramas runs rampant in this tale of modern farming folk. As always with Bartlett the play is packed with provoking ideas – in this case about the environment, industrial vs organic cultivation, and the impossibility of living without compromise. But it feels like a poor retread of his excellent 2017 play Albion, which explored the state of England through the metaphor of a country garden. And this time round I didn’t believe in the characters or their relationships at all.
Hattie Morahan is Ruth, a wealthy fortysomething divorcee who has somehow hooked up with taciturn and peculiar countryman Lip (Sam Troughton). Together, they’ve acquired his estranged father’s farm on the old man’s deathbed with a view to turning it into an “ethical, producing, profitable business”. Yeah, good luck with that.
Improbably, they’re visited by her ex-husband’s hostile, bratty daughter Milly (Nadia Parkes) and her black and possibly gay friend Femi (Terique Jarrett), who just happens to be a whizz-kid agriculturalist. Oafish Tony (Jonathan Slinger) also drops by from his enormous neighbouring farm, to serve up gammony banter.
Hard to believe these people would ever spend two minutes with each other. They start off trading insults and progress to swapping long speeches about globalisation and an absolutist, back-to-the-land rusticity. Lip is initially entirely silent apart from the odd snatch of folksong, his troubling gaze roving some distant horizon, until he abruptly becomes a loquacious priest of the soil. When he brings on an axe in the third act, symbolism klaxons start blaring.
Milly, meanwhile, flips improbably and suddenly from urban princess to earth babe, apparently as a way of healing from some undefined, possibly incestuous trauma. The most convincing and amusing transformation is that of Tony, who takes up self-care and therapy after being bereaved. “Thought I was a disastrous pr*ck,” he observes. “Turns out it’s not my fault.”
There are plenty of zingers like this alongside Bartlett’s big intellectual swings, but the play itself feels thin and undercooked, the plot twists and emotional revelations unearned. Every character is underwritten, with Femi the sketchiest and Milly a close second. Morahan, a superb actress, adopts a slowly tightening rictus of desperation as Ruth soaks up Lip’s madness, Milly’s antagonism and Tony’s gross propositions. We all know people with unsuitable partners, but come on – did she not notice Lip’s serial-killer strangeness? Tony gets the best lines but also a surprising spurt of empathy near the end.
There are asides about Margaret Thatcher and Brexit, AI and pandemics. Bartlett’s determination to ask questions rather than offer answers imbues the play with a deadening despair. Capitalism will destroy the planet, but the alternatives are unrealistic (adopting an organic lifestyle, for instance, is the equivalent of booking a first class seat on a plane, we’re told). Director James Macdonald can’t do much to dilute the long, unspooling screeds of words that increasingly pass for dialogue in the script. “Let’s just talk more,” Lip says at one point. Please, I thought, let’s not.
It's set by designer ULTZ on a wooden platform set in a slope of earth and turf which is partially transformed and replanted over the second of two intervals. Again, this recalls similar changes to Miriam Buether’s garden set for Albion. In the past, Bartlett gave us ambitious and impressive fare such as Cock, Earthquakes in London and the prescient King Charles III on stage, not to mention the absurdly gripping Doctor Foster on TV. With this play and its West End predecessor, Unicorn, he’s descended into blather, explaining things rather than showing them to the audience. Shame.
Donmar Warehouse, to Oct 4; donmarwarehouse.com
