BACK TO THE LAND
Birdsong, a grassy bank. At a rough rustic table sits a rough rustic: bearded, silent, rolling fags and contemplating a broken tractor part. Into this Thomas-Hardy idyll prance two young moderns; Milly (Nadia Parkes) in full influencer makeup and bare tummy, and Femi (Terique Jarrett) springing around happily in beach-shorts. They bum a spliff off the older man, who stumps off silently with his lump of metal to a shrill cry of “Rude!” From Milly.
Mike Bartlett, who was last delighting us up West with a revived UNICORN, has a gift for creating almost cartoonishly awful middle-class modern characters, in sparky dialogue you want to jot down. In the opening scenes of this odd new play he first displays it bravissimo in the whining rants of Milly, complaining that the lush Ultz-set grass might contain bugs, and then doing the full gen Z rant about how Lip – Sam Troughton’s solidly taciturn urbanit returning to his dead father’s farm – t – has no right to go “goblining around” looking the way he does , because “self care”’is a moral imperative. And anyway she hates her ex-stepmum Ruth who is living with him and paying the bills while they try to turn the arable farm into an organic mixed enterprise with darling pigs fed on scraps and all their own vegetables.
Ruth – the splendid Hattie Morahan – turns up all white-shirt, jeans, designer-boots and shining hair with trays of food, laying out a Markle-style tablescape with bits of lavender. Enter widowed Tony from the next farm ( Jonathan Slinger) all agri-biz scorn for their ‘hobby farm’ dreams but fancying Ruth no end. Young Femi, it turns out, is starting an Oxford course on rural sustainability and knows enough already for some youthful mansplaining to the others. Emotions rise until Lip violently throws a shovelful of earth onto the supper table, to demonstrate how few worms there are these days. Milly defiantly fossicks in it shouting “well, here’s one! oh no, it’s pasta”.
The theme, hammered at in three directions for the best part of three-hours-two-intervals, is what is right for us: big agribiz for profit and feeding the masses reasonably cheaply, or aiming for minimal chemicals and kindly pasture-beast manure and horticulture. Or – Lip suddenly veers this way – we should go prehistoric, return the Cotswolds to temperate rainforest and roving wolves, smash phones and live in a hut on vegetables. Oh, and avoid modern science, including medicine, because we all ought to die sooner and feed the biocycle. The problem here is that Ruth is expecting a baby and has strong views about keeping it alive.
Full disclosure: we farmed for a decade organically before it was fashionable, and I too can bore for England about soil aeration, rotation and agrochemical damage. As indeed can most Archers listeners these days: it has all been talked about for twenty-five years. In the middle act – where sadly the magnificent Milly has vanished – Bartlett fleshes out the emotional issues : Tony’s loneliness and his genuine respect for Ruth’s intentions (Slinger is terrific, both funny and moving in the reality of his widowhood). Lip’s increasing battiness rises. They all talk and talk and talk. Then talk some more, none of them doing any actual farming, though Tony clearly has chaps out there doing it for him. Then they talk and talk some more. During the men’s long speeches Hattie Morahan brilliantly deploys her gift for appalled facial expressions of horror, resignation, helplessness and stony determination not to let the dingbat Lip draw her back.
During the second interval some five or six years elapse, stagehands deftly rip up the stage and produce some saplings and an old motor-tyre, and Femi has finished his PhD and got some clothes on. But Milly is still there, having become Lip’s sidekick and gone grunge-rural and a convert to his sustainable rewilded hovel-life. The others return one by one. And talk. And talk. Modern life , we learn from Lip and Milly, is but a wretched serfdom to global tyrants like Tesla , Meta and Netflix. From Femi comes an explanation of how post-Thatcher (oh, here we go!) globalized capitalism clashes with our deep Neolithic needs and confuses the middle-boomer generation. . But he knows better: capitalism is still humanity’s best chance, owing to AI.
They all recriminate and TED-talk at one another some more (except Tony, who just gently reminds his old friend Lip that he’s always had crazes , for months once experimenting with an eight day week). Oh, and Ruth wants her investment in the farm back. As you would. Lip sits, all silent glittering eyes and bristle. There are sound effects which may suggest that Ruth’s chaps are already busy flattening Lip’s fledgling rainforest. Maybe someone will die, no spoilers. But by then, sadly, you hardly care. It is not Bartlett’s best play.
donmarwarehouse.com to 4 October
Rating 3
theatreCat 