Mike Bartlett’s striking three-act play is a curiously changing thing. It begins as a blended-family satire with eco-arguments and generational clash bolted on. But with each act the ground on its earthy set turns, developing into what might be a state-of-the-nation play and entering into similar ground to Bartlett’s brilliant Albion in its portrait of middle-class urbanites who have upped sticks for an alternative, “better” rural existence through sustainable farming.
It grows into something bigger and more universal still, to become a play about how to live responsibly in the midst of toxic capitalism. Are the characters who seek freedom in fact in retreat? Is localism just a yearning for a purer past and can we rewild our way to a new pastoral idyll? Important questions are asked through the prism of a family headed up by Ruth (Hattie Morahan), her shaggy, laconic partner, Lip (Sam Troughton) and Ruth’s former stepdaughter, Milly (Nadia Parkes).
Lip is ecowarrior and would-be guru in the mould of Jez Butterworth’s Rooster, although more privileged – his farm is a family inheritance – and not nearly as charismatic. Ruth shares his dream of getting back to a kinder, more elemental way of living – up to a point.
Under the direction of James Macdonald, the lights do not dip. This draws our eye to the vivid daylight on Lip’s fields, and maybe also the idea that this story about ethical ways of living is of our world, and we are part of it.
The set designed by Ultz (who also designed that of Jerusalem) is a grassy bank. It is a living, breathing thing, it seems, with birdsong, tufts of grass that occasionally tumble down and – less welcome – a small, strange insect found in this critic’s bra.
The cast give excellent performances and the action is intriguing, the arguments holding us, but the story in itself seems contrived around the play’s ideas. Sometimes these announce themselves in the mouths of characters, especially Milly’s friend, Femi (Terique Jarrett). He is doing an MSc in contemporary rural economy at Oxford, we are told. He certainly sounds as if he is by the third act when he lectures Lip (and us?) on everything from Gen X legacies from Thatcher’s Britain to the economics of global capitalism. Lip, too, seems like an anti-Enlightenment construct – a luddite who puts his principles above life-saving modern medicine.
There is plenty that captures current-day anxieties too around technology, globalisation and the disenchantment of preppers and survivalists. Vitally, it is thoroughly amusing, alongside the serious stuff. Milly is full of beady-eyed Gen Z attitude without becoming a caricature. Tony (Jonathan Slinger), the farmer next door who is trying to rejuvenate himself in his mid-life (crisis?) is simultaneously satirised and heartfelt.
Despite its lecturing and trowel-load of ideas, it is compelling and ambitious, Chekhovian in glimmers. Bartlett masterfully weds levity through social satire with complexity and depth of subject matter.
And there is something courageous in its biting off more than it can chew. It is not so much a state-of-the-nation play as a state-of-the-world drama, grappling with the very real and prevailing despair over how to live, fix the climate crisis, and find collective hope. Invigorating and welcome, except, of course, for the rogue insect.