Barney Norris ’s new play is about the struggle to come to terms with loss — on a personal level and a national one. Set in rural Hampshire, it pictures a farming family crippled by bereavement. Siblings Ryan and Lou are mourning the death of their father, but together with their mother Jenny and Lou’s on-off boyfriend Pete they’re also haunted by an episode of madness that has had appalling repercussions for all of them.
As in his previous work, Norris imagines people straining to cling on to their dreams and some semblance of individuality. This is a requiem for a vanishing rustic culture, astute about the ways in which the hardships and haphazardness of country life are often underestimated. At the same time it ponders the legacy of 2016’s Brexit vote. When Ophelia Lovibond ’s increasingly suburban Lou complains that her father’s death that year is obscured by more famous exits — Prince, David Bowie and George Michael — we sense her pain but also her short-sightedness.
Images of division and detachment are underscored in Laurie Sansom’s production, which is dominated by a giant stretch of raised oil pipeline — the most imposing feature of a design by Rae Smith that shimmers whenever the sun dips. Pete and Ryan are illegally tapping the pipeline. While for Sion Daniel Young’s agitated, watchful Ryan it’s the latest desperate bid to evade the trap of poverty, for Jenny (a touching yet at times rather too prim Claire Skinner) it’s a symptom of the malign influence of Ukweli Roach's Pete.
Every relationship in the play is awkward, coloured by anxieties about duty, money, truth and inheritance. There are some trenchant lines and well-judged moments of melancholy, but the characters don’t have enough texture, and in this large venue the story’s essential slightness feels overexposed. It would work better in a more intimate space.
Until May 26
