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The newsreel footage is indelible. Piles of dead cattle burning, hooves sticking out of the flames. Hedgerows draped in hazard tape. Men in white chemsuits milling around. Bea Roberts’s play, joint winner of Theatre 503’s new playwrighting award, takes us into the very heart of the foot and mouth pandemic of 2001 and argues that agriculture never really recovered. Nightjars are, after all, an omen of death.
Set in a Devonshire cowshed – with a design by Max Dorey that’s so life-like you half-suspect the theatre’s started dairy farming as a daytime sideline – ‘Nightjars’ follows old-time farmer Michael (David Fielder) and local vet Jeff (Nigel Hastings) over a decade, from a calving to a cull and onwards. That Michael’s herd, his ‘girls’, are named after the royal family is all the symbolism you need.
You feel deeply for both men. Michael, simple-hearted and all at sea, lost his wife not long ago. Jeff’s in the process of losing his. He sleeps on a camp bed in the study and carries a hipflask. Both lose their lot: their families, their livelihoods, everything they’ve built up over years.
In looking out for one another, these two broken men become an odd couple. Roberts suggests that a kind of peace is possible for them – and there’s some hope in that – but it’s always more a matter of making do than mending, let alone moving on. It’s tender, beautifully balanced writing, and Paul Robinson’s elegiac production serves it well. Sally Ferguson’s eloquent lighting shows the passing of time: sometimes funeral pyres flicker, sometimes fireworks go off.
The countryside too learns to get by. No longer productive (don’t forget the price of a pint of milk today), farmers hire out fields for weddings and, in a Chekhovian touch, convert barns into holiday homes. This is an England without an income stream, asset-stripping to survive, and it’s heartbreaking.