Beautifully understated and emotionally overpowering

Theatre The York Realist Donmar Warehouse

★★★★★

This is a revelation, like barely noticing someone, then turning round, seeing them in a new light and being bowled over, falling head over heels.

In 2002, Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic, was utterly scathing about Peter Gill’s portrait of fleeting devotion between a Yorkshire farmhand and a middle-class aspiring director, formed during the staging of the medieval Mysteries in York in the early Sixties. When I saw the play at the Royal Court, I can’t say I much sided either with its fiercest detractors or its most fervent admirers.

Liberated – paradoxically – by the greater intimacy of the Donmar, allowing every nuance and every look to register, Robert Hastie’s revival is so beautifully understated and emotionally overpowering that it makes the case for the work as a modern classic. And without any of the sexual explicitness of the comparable Britflick God’s Own Country, it’s also about the most erotic thing on the London stage.

The evening begins following the death of the brawny rustic hero’s mother. Ben Batt’s George is all flagstone-hard taciturnity when Jonathan Bailey’s John, up for a week at the Theatre Royal, visits out of the blue. The action slips back in time, enabling us to grasp why there’s such anguished tension between the two and why, given that the maternal apron-strings binding George to his tumbledown abode are finally severed, it still proves impossible for him to answer the call of his affections and up sticks.

No praise can be too high for the performances here: not a dud note, not a word or gesture or glance wasted. Batt is career-makingly fine as the diffident, self-doubting but also rugged George; and as the posh interloper Bailey conjures fertile acres of curiosity and flowering fascination with his nervous laughs and bright-eyed stares.

In a production suffused with Chekhovian tragicomic touches, Lesley Nicol brings a smile to your lips as George’s mother, keeping you guessing as to whether this kind-hearted soul really can’t see what’s going on when the men are forced to share a bed. Plaudits, too, for Katie West as George’s persistent admirer, Doreen; Brian Fletcher as his dreamily and insolently detached nephew, Jack; and Lucy Black as his married (but not happily) sister, Barbara. By ’eck, it’s a good ’un.

Until March 24. Tickets: 020 3282 3808; donmarwarehouse.com. Then transfers to Sheffield Crucible (0114 249 6000), March 27-April 7