Like a slight episode of ‘The Archers’
Theatre Nightfall Bridge Theatre
The temptation to soften the critical blow when it comes to Nightfall is tremendous. Aged just 31, its author Barney Norris has written two acclaimed novels, and the 2014 award-winning play Visitors. Here, we’re told, is a writer of rare sensitivity, compassion and insight intent on exploring backwater England at a time of immense change.
Yet Nightfall strikes me as a disappointing dip in the thus-far accomplished programme at the all-new Bridge. As a family drama, it’s pedestrian and unpersuasive. As a reflection on the pressures facing the rural community, it’s like an underwhelming episode of The Archers. Indeed, having gazed for several hours at Rae Smith’s unlovely, ravagedbucolic set, dominated by an oil pipeline, I was left feeling Radio 4 would be a far better home for it.
That pipeline is going to provide an illicit supply of fuel for Ryan, who’s struggling to run his late father’s Hampshire farm. We first see him watching his obliging handyman Pete (who served a prison sentence in his stead for an attack that left its victim in a wheelchair) siphoning oil into a tank. Still-grieving mother Jenny hasn’t grasped Pete’s prior self-sacrifice and tries to thwart romantic overtures between him and her daughter Lou.
The play tilts between chewing over predicaments forged by the slimline plot and grander, editorialising statements. The crepuscular themes should emerge and entwine organically – the raw pain of letting go of the past, of grown-up children, of a way of life – but there’s a continual air of strain about Laurie Sansom’s production.
So superb as the harassed mum in Outnumbered, Claire Skinner brings to the uptight Jenny a fresh heap of suppressed emotion, but she resembles a clothes-catalogue idea of “country”. Sion Daniel Young (Ryan), Ukweli Roach (Pete) and Ophelia Lovibond (Lou) complete the quartet. Laudably diligent they are, too, but it’s slight, mildly soporific stuff.
Until May 26. Tickets: 0844 871 2118; tickets.telegraph.co.uk