By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: *****

WHEN? Tuesday 19 August, opens 26 August and runs through 4 October 2025 RUNTIME: 165 minutes (including 2 intervals)

What do you get if you cross the desire for self-sufficiency of TV’s The Good Life with the farming techniques of wilding and regeneration seen in Clarkson’s Farm?

• Read on for reasons including how this is 1 of the most interesting plays 1 of this country’s most celebrated writers has yet penned

Director James Macdonald (Waiting For Godot, Theatre Royal Haymarket) gives us a platform with a bench on a farm looking out across others in present day England as we can smell the turf and hear the birdsong.

Sam Troughton (La Musica, Young Vic) plays farmer Lip, who chooses his words carefully, and Hattie Morahan, (Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, Barbican Centre) his new wife Ruth who is investing heavily in the farm and wants to change its use which has seen the soil compacted and deserted of the worms and nutrients it needs to thrive.

They are entertaining Hattie’s nature-loathing stepdaughter Millie played by Nadia Parkes and her friend Femi, a lively Terique Jarrett, who is studying agriculture and has his own theories about developing the land yet is more provocative when he asks Lip whether he minds if he sunbathes naked on the farm.

Throw in neighbouring farmer Jonathan Slinger (City Of Angels, Garrick Theatre) who is good friends with Lip, has a poorly wife and an eye perhaps for Ruth and the stage is set for an extremely interesting look at rural life, the state of farming, globalisation and living off grid.

You know that new material like this is striking a chord when you can hear people all around you in the 2 intervals here arguing about the merits of throwing away a mobile phone and whether an older mother nearing her due date could do without 1.

The play’s title might even be a Biblical reference to Job eating juniper root showing he was brought to the lowest depths of starvation or the ‘coals of juniper’ representing God’s wrath compared to the fierce long heat that the juniper root creates.

Material like this has to be strong enough to justify its extended running time and there’s plenty to dwell on here long after curtain down.

Troughton’s Lip is certainly no fan of the commodification of life while Femi believes Lip’s generation who grew up under Thatcher and whose lives were improved by the benefits of globalisation are now lost as they mourn the local industry that disappeared as a result.

It’s also very funny and in keeping with much of Mike Bartlett’s (Unicorn Garrick Theatre) earlier work which looks at differences between generations, sexes and sexualities through a modern lens.

It reminded us of Ibsen’s Enemy Of The People in its quest to expose unpalatable truths and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard as conservation is thwarted but, ultimately, it’s 1 of the most interesting plays 1 of this country’s most celebrated writers has yet penned.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Donmar Warehouse Tickets
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