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.
The patch of grassland on which the play is performed therefore becomes a court of opinion in which arguments rage about how we survive our future. Tony (Jonathan Slinger), who runs the just-profitable adjoining farm, and a now pregnant Ruth argue on the side of pragmatism, positioned against Lip and Milly who, over the play’s years (and the two intervals of James Macdonald’s production) has become as committed as Lip to re-wilding the land.
Many of the arguments about the coming environmental catastrophe may be familiar but, as with Bartlett’s recent play Unicorn, which was about a couple who become a “throuple”, there lurks beneath the plot a palpable and uneasy end-of-days sense. Tony, whose unrequited love for Ruth lends the play a Chekhovian sadness, can no longer see a future worth farming for. Far from following following a trend, Bartlett is warning of what’s to come.
Donmar Warehouse
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