Countryside drama
How rural plays are taking centre stage in our theatres
In Jerusalem, still the best play of the last decade, Jez Butterworth took audiences deep into England’s green and pleasant land. His anarchic comedy, in which Mark Rylance led a rabble of bucolic misfits, including Morris-dancing publicans and pilled-up young farmers, was a rare excursion into the countryside for metropolitan theatregoers, who are more used to seeing sink estates and suburbs onstage than Wiltshire woodlands. It proved that rural life can make the most exhilarating theatre.
Nine years later, the countryside is back in town. Over the next few months, new plays about rural life will land on some of the most significant stages around the country. Barney Norris’s Nightfall, set on a failing family farm near Winchester, comes to the Bridge Theatre in April, shortly after Joe White’s Shropshire-set Mayfly opens at the Orange Tree in Richmond. Before both, the Royal Court stages a rural crime drama: Simon Longman’s Gundog. Surprisingly, given their sleepy settings, all are by writers under the age of 35. Could we be witnessing the birth of a new kind of rural play?
If we are, then Brexit is partly the reason. Norris points out that writers have always written about rural life
– “I write that world because it’s what I know” – but now, theatres are taking notice. “We were doing this anyway. The really interesting thing is that our plays – the bumpkins, as it were – are getting programmed in theatres.
“What was interesting about the referendum result was the degree of surprise from the people that voted to remain. [But] if you went around the country, there was a Ukip poster on every roadside.” Britain’s urban population had lost sight of the concerns of their compatriots in the country, but theatres did little to remedy that. In fact, they were complicit, repeatedly focusing on pressing urban issues such as multiculturalism without giving a platform to rural concerns. As Norris points out, “great swathes of people got left behind by that – just because they don’t eat at Nobu or whatever”.
Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the Royal Court, admits there’s some truth in that. In seeking new writers, she says, metropolitan theatres have tended to prioritise “marginalised urban voices” – largely on the basis of proximity. “We see the impact of not giving those voices a space, creatively, whereas in cities, we don’t feel the impact of not giving the same space to rural voices.”
In that regard, the EU referendum result was a rude awakening. “As a country, we are paying more attention to the stories that are being told outside of city centres,” she says.
The current run of rural plays is a kind of catch-up, maybe even an attempt to make amends. For Norris, by putting lives that have been less culturally visible onstage, there’s a sense of restoring balance: “Tonight, this is going to be the centre of the world, and you’re going to give it all of your attention. Everywhere has the potential to be worth watching: a patch of lawn, a scrap of headland – wherever.” What these plays find there isn’t all that pretty. None of them could be described as idyllic. “I don’t want to sentimentalise country life,” says Longman, 30. “The geography can be beautiful and scenic, but if you’ve got to live there, it’s really hard.” He talks of the “listlessness” that comes from isolation, while Norris flags the high suicide rates: “The problem is making money, really,” he concludes.
That’s echoed in Matt Hartley’s Here I Belong, which starts a village hall tour next month with the rural theatre company Pentabus. It charts half a century of social decline in small towns around Britain, as people move away, jobs disappear and “cuts to services really start cutting through”. “All of those things are playing a huge part in rural life today,” says Hartley, and yet, when theatre has examined the effects of austerity, it’s routinely done so through an urban frame. “The countryside is a forgotten place in the theatre.” In recent years, the Arts Council has sought to reverse that in terms of arts provision, offering strategic funding for areas of low cultural engagement, most of them rural. That has shaped the sort of plays being written and it’s notable that both Longman and White have done stints as playwrights-in-residence at Pentabus, leading to wider recognition. “Pentabus is probably one of the most important theatre companies in the country,” Hartley stresses. Where it has led, other new writing theatres – such as the Royal Court – have followed.
Of course, rural plays are nothing new – Shakespeare wrote plenty of pastorals – but they do tend to be few and far between. Many dramatists treat the countryside not as a setting, but as a subject. Richard Bean’s Harvest (2005) used a failing pig farm as a metaphor for British agriculture as a whole, for instance. Others are more committed to country living: notably Caryl Churchill with her 1983 play Fen, which looked at farming with a feminist gaze, or the Yorkshire flavoured plays of David Storey and Robert Holman. Featherstone points out that Irish, Scottish and Welsh writers are much more prone to telling rural stories. “The voice of those rural communities has felt much closer to summing up and defining a country than it has in England until now.”
Longman says that he anticipated “a big re-energising of rural stories following Jerusalem,” but it never came. Perhaps, the seeds it planted have simply taken time to sprout. Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011) looked at pest control, while Bea Roberts remembered the devastation of foot-and-mouth in And Then Come the Nightjars (2015). In the last year, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, DC Moore’s Common and Mike Bartlett’s Albion have all centred on the state of the English countryside.
It’s striking how many of those plays are grounded in grief – similarly, Gundog, Nightfall and Mayfly are all triggered by a death in the family. “There’s something about the countryside that takes you to the fundamentals of life very quickly,” says Norris, but you don’t have to stretch very far for a metaphor – a break with the past or a lost way of life. Since 2013, agriculture has accounted for less that one per cent of employment in the UK, with the number of farm labourers down almost 20per cent this century.
“What happens when you’re not anchored to anything any more, whether that’s family history or a traditionalist way of life?” asks Longman. “Do you continue to do what you’ve been brought up to do, or do you try to break out of that?” In Gundog, he writes about the juxtaposition of “an old way of life” and new technologies. “The internet,” he stresses, “is an urban space.”
Norris says that he’s aware of having written a play about “a lost leader” and, with it, a family that’s lost its sense of permanence or its roots. It’s a small step from there to the state of the nation. There’s something about a square of earth on a stage that stands for England as a whole. “Go back 200 years,” says Norris, “and every single one of us worked the land – except the person that owned it. In moments of contested identity, that history’s a useful thing to have on your side.”
When it comes to their sensibility, however, these rural plays are completely contemporary. British theatre has, in recent years, thrown up a strand of slower, softer and more lyrical dramas – plays that give audiences space to think. Rural plays often give you that for free, Hartley believes: “They allow for different types of drama, for space and contemplation.”
Many of them, too, are lapping and still; their emphasis less on plot than on people – Bartlett’s Albion borrowed that from Chekhov, while Stewart Pringle’s Trestle followed a friendship that blossomed between meetings at a village hall. There’s politics in that: they ask us to empathise with those that lead different ways of life. “You can spark a play with a knife fight or with a family trying to hold itself together,” Norris insists. “It’s just about asserting the validity of marginal life.”
‘The interesting thing is that our plays – the bumpkins, as it were – are getting programmed in theatres’