Doleful The Budso f May
This cold comfort farm has acres of angst but, sadly, not much else . . .
Nightfall (Bridge Theatre)
Verdict: Rural rumblings for smug townies
LONDON’S stage seldom gives us modern English rural life, so Barney Norris’s Nightfall is, in that respect, mildly refreshing.
It is set in Hampshire on a near-bankrupt farm which is home to a fiftysomething widow and her two adult children.
Yet young Mr Norris conveys little authentic sense of shires attitudes. Perhaps his point is that country life is no less grim than that in the cities. With its pessimism and joylessness, this is certainly no Darling Buds Of May.
The newish Bridge Theatre, part-run by Sir Nicholas Hytner, is too big a space for this undercooked tale which has only four characters (in addition to the widow and her children, we have Pete, who has recently done time for assault).
Rae Smith’s design is handsome: the edge of a red-brick farmhouse, a mouldering tractor and the front field straddled by a pressurised oil pipeline. The broad sky suggests an open-country freedom which is never felt in the text.
One reason why the farm is struggling financially may be that no one on it ever does any agricultural work.
This is not my experience of country living. Our neighbours in Herefordshire seldom cease in their dusty toil. Fruitless farm labour can carry a particular pathos. Playwright Norris missed a trick.
Instead the play opens with Pete and his skinny pal Ryan, the widow’s son, illegally tapping the pipeline to steal oil.
The plot suggests they will sell this oil to use for both household heating and as fuel for farm machines. Sounds unlikely to me. After this minor burst of activity, much of the time is devoted to anguished talk, a hint of alcoholism as widow Jenny hits the G&Ts, and a touching rekindling of romance between Pete (Ukweli Roach) and Ryan’s pretty sister Lou (Ophelia Lovibond).
Both Pete and Ryan (Sion Daniel Young) remove their shirts to show us their muscles, should your taste run to that sort of thing.
All three young characters are well acted, so far as the lines permit. Credibility is stretched to creaking when Lou makes a personal disclosure to Pete and poor Mr Roach has to deliver a string of ridiculously weak reaction lines.
The casting of Claire Skinner as an increasingly jaded Jenny is less successful. Chic Miss Skinner adopts a West Country accent that would barely pass muster in a French and Saunders comedy sketch.
I could not for a moment believe that she was a boozer fraying at the edges.
THE family splinters. There is talk of selling the farm for a housing development. Pete and Lou contemplate emigration and there are a lot of F-words.
The Bridge’s fashionable firstnight audience laughed at Jenny in a superior way when she let slip that she wanted to see the Carole King musical in London. I couldn’t help thinking that the Carole King musical was a lot more fun than this snoozy fare.
The show’s programme, pretentious to ‘Pseuds’ Corner’ levels, tells us that prolific Mr Norris (b.1987) is one of the genius storytellers of his generation and that this play is a mighty fable of all that is wrong with our country. It would be a pity if his supporters broke his talent with such hype.
He may indeed have some promise but he is at present weak on plot and he presents a rural England that is little more authentic than the BBC’s Countryfile programme.
Real friends might urge him to put the top on his pen for a while and get some life under his belt.