You could be forgiven for thinking that Mike Bartlett has turned from being a playwright who sets agendas into one who follows them. Certainly with his latest play it feels as if the writer who exploded onto the theatrical landscape with such plays as Cock and My Child is jumping onto the hot button issue of environmental crisis for his latest play.
His middle-aged main protagonists are Lip (Sam Troughton) and Ruth (Hattie Morahan), who are starting their lives over by taking their new relationship out of the city and into the country, to live a more sustainable life on a family farm that has recently come into Lip’s possession.
Ruth optimistically describes the vision for their new life consisting of “food from the farm, energy from the sun and heat from the ground”, but a visit from Ruth’s Gen Z stepdaughter Milly (Nadia Parkes) and particularly her agri-obsessed Oxford student friend Femi (Terique Jarret) causes a rethink in Lip.
He now wants to smash his and Ruth’s mobile phones and live seriously off grid. We’re talking subsistence farming and living off as little land as possible while letting the rest re-wild. It’s the only way to “do no harm” to the earth, he argues. He makes Tom and Barbara in The Good Life look like Donald Trump.
