The farmer wants a life

If you had to pick one of the more cheery professions, bookies or PR merchants might be among them - certainly not farmers. Even before the crushing blows of foot-and-mouth and mad cow disease, they had a high suicide rate.

Nell Leyshon's debut play, the first of a trilogy about rural change, is set on a mid-Somerset farm. Things are pretty dire, and when a gun is mentioned in the first act, you do wonder. After all, a wodge of unpaid bills languishes in a cardboard box under the battered but sturdy kitchen table, and work has dried up so much that son Gavin is helping make ends meet with menial work in a supermarket - ironically, the place that is making it harder for the family to sell its produce profitably.

Conflict boils between man-of-the-soil father and son, and husband and tormented wife. Meanwhile, grandfather Edmond slips in and out of senility, reminiscing fondly about his beloved prize bulls and cows and long-past rolls in the hay with comely wenches.

Of course, there are no cows any more, as Vic - a DH Lawrence-type patriarchal male full of explosive and blinkered anger - reminds him constantly. John Peters's Vic is indeed a study of man who, in failing to provide for his family or pass the farming line on to his son, feels his manhood diminished. His only response is to lash out, and the main victim is his wife Rose, played by Maggie Tagney as if her very innards are being shredded by anxiety.

Leyshon's plotting is clunky at first and generally suffers from a lack of density, while Sean Aita's direction for the Strode Theatre Company, while reflecting the country's slower pace of life, is often too sluggish.

However, Aita effectively points up the currents of emotion coursing through the piece. Both director and author grew up on Somerset farms and there is here a sense of terrible waste in a heartfelt and touching lament for an industry and people brought to their knees.

The Farm