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Flowers of the Field

  • Theatre, Drama
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

3 out of 5 stars

‘I have a vision of an England singing songs of dignity and strength.’ So speaks Archie Gilligan, whose search for the ancient folk songs of England among the country’s dwindling rural population forms the backbone of this intelligent new play by Kevin Mandry.

The year is 1918, and in Sussex – where Gilligan (Josh Taylor), a composer-turned-army captain on leave, rocks up with his newfangled recording machine – the rumble of gunfire is audible from across the Channel. Local farmer George Bainton (Ian Mairs) has been invalided out of the war, but he is facing a battle of his own: persuading the unwilling Sarah (Isabella Marshall) to become his wife.

Mandry’s piece is inspired by the real-life musical quests of famous song-hunters such as Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger, who – along with composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams – saw the English countryside as a repository of vernacular wisdom and tranquillity, even when reality proved it to be quite the opposite. Mandry has some fun with this – there’s an amusing scene in which Gilligan keeps turning his nose up at the farmers’ music hall songs for not being ‘authentic aboriginal material’ – and his depiction of the plight of Sarah is sensitively handled.

Marshall, too, stands out among an uneven cast, lending Sarah a touching, fierce dignity. David Cottis’s production could do with a good deal more vim, but this is, overall, an enjoyable examination of a century-old period of accelerated change, and the song-collectors who sought to preserve a slice of English history before it was lost for ever.

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