Comfort Me with Apples

Synopsis

Autumn, and the orchard is full of cider apples: Beauty of Bath, Kingston Black and Glory of the West. Inside the farmhouse, the rule of matriarch Irene is challenged when her estranged daughter returns and her middle-aged son, beginning to tire of being tied to the unprofitable farm, grows restless. A richly evocative tale about life in our changing rural landscape.

Our Review:

23 January 2007

I feel like a spoilsport, a rotten apple in the barrel of acclaim that greeted Nell Leyshon’s second play a year or so ago. Even then, I was bemused by the critical reception. Leyshon was awarded the Evening Standard most promising playwright gong and now Lucy Bailey’s dutiful, humourless and catastrophically slow and uninformative production has been revived with a new cast for a national tour.

Like David Rudkin’s brilliant shocker Afore Night Come, the setting is an orchard, only in Somerset, not Essex, and the atmosphere similarly doom-laden, only to no great purpose. The apples are rotting. The cider press is unused. The farm is about to be sold. The head of the family has just died. The estranged daughter has returned after three years away. And there is still an eternity to endure until the interval.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as keen on theatrical atmospherics as the next Somerset-loving scrumpy swiller. And Mike Britton’s steeply raked ash heap of an orc...

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Latest User Review

80.177.231.164) - 23 January 2007:

The play is derivative and dull but the acting is impressive. ...

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