There is a change going on in theatre writing. The sock-it-to-you, metropolitan, lad and ladette plays that so dominated the mid-1990s are still with us, but there is also a growing trend for plays that are more reflective, socially acute and politically aware.
Peter Gill's The York Realist, premiered at the Royal Court, was one example. Now, courtesy of Oxford Stage Company, Naomi Wallace offers another with this epic, dense and absorbing account of the difficulties faced by Capability Brown and the gardening pioneers of the mid-18th century in transforming the English landscape. Creating lakes and hills where there are none proves easy compared with the difficulties faced when trying to transform the psyche. In its mixture of sinuous poetry and political sharpness, this is a play that, at its best, holds a torch to Edward Bond at his peak.
That doesn't always make it easy to watch. Wallace digs away at her subject with more tenacity than her anti-hero Asquith Brown, the less successful brother of Capability, who fails to realise his brother's vision of a new England because of the mud, the villagers' reluctance to move and his own demons. The strain of being a farmer's son turned gentleman is beginning to show - mostly in his britches, and in his relationship with Hesp, a young village widow who seeks to satisfy the ache in her loins but finds it far better sated by collective action.
There is a lot of sod to be turned here, perhaps too much for a single play, but the tension between the individual and the community is tackled from many angles, and Wallace offers myriad fascinating reflections on class, altruism and selfishness, dreams and realities, the pleasures and limitations of sex.
Wilton's Music Hall provides an atmospheric setting, although it soaks up both sound and energy. This is theatre of scope, imagination and bloody-minded ambition. We should cherish it, or run the risk of losing it altogether.
Until April 28. Box office: 020-7836 9712.
