Pig Farm (St James Theatre)

Babe, Three Little Pigs and Charlotte’s Web have given us the wrong idea, apparently, about life down on the pig farm. In parts of America, at least, the pigs are out of control, creating sludge crises in rivers and forests and a total nightmare for the environmental protection agencies.

Greg Kotis, book and lyric writer on Urinetown, has taken this background to serve up an occasionally hilarious surreal sausage roll of a play on the day of a pig count – there are thousands of them – on a large smallholding where everyone’s name begins with a T: Tom’s Tina wants Tim while Teddy wants a tick on his pig vouchers.

Actually, Charlotte Parry‘s tremendous Tina wants a baby and, while husband Tom (Dan Fredenburgh) is down the road apace dumping the sludge, she’s humping the drudge, the teenaged Tim (Erik Odom) who’s on work experience and getting a whole lot more than he bargained for.

Enter the sublime Stephen Tompkinson as swivel-eyed, gleamingly officious Teddy, the EPA man in a beige uniform who’s filing a report to DC after his two outriders – whom we never see, but they’re T-initialled, too; they’ve got the whole thing’s down to a T, in fact – have checked their numbers against Tim’s, or Tom’s.

But what starts out looking like a slow parody of one of Eugene O’Neill’s farmhand scenarios, with an undertow of inter-familial resentments and sexual rumbling, develops into one almighty sludge, gore and fumble-fest, hurtling towards the brazen excesses of Tracy Letts after a specious nod in Sam Shepard’s direction.

The whole of Katharine Farmer‘s piggy production is an American rural send-up with a message: an ecological crisis has been hi-jacked for theatrical satire, and it’s not the least of the evening’s pleasures to sense this awkward shifting of cultural consumption gears in the audience.

The pigs, needless to say, run loose from their pens outside, the rain lashes down, the sludge gets everywhere, the kitchen table in Carla Goodman‘s suitably grubby design is as rudely occupied as the kitchen table in The Postman Always Rings Twice, there’s a terrible accident involving the pick-up truck and a Jacobean tragedy finale.

Not just the pigs, but also human aspirations, are trampled underfoot: Tim’s too rapid coming-of-age, Tina’s maternal instincts, Tom’s testosterone-deficient ambitions – he’s far more porky than perky – and even Teddy’s conversion to the cause, as he suddenly savours the mucky delights of pig farming as opposed to those of number crunching.

Pig Farm runs at the St James Theatre until 21 November.