Even the most die-hard city dweller surely entertains fantasies of packing it all in for a self-sustained rural existence when a politician says something mad, or the weather does something weird, or grabbing a few essentials from the supermarket rings up over £50.
Well, this new comedy drama from state-of-the-nation playwright Mike Bartlett is, on one level, here to warn anyone with such notions not to hand in their notice just yet. Farming requires dedication and an understanding of the land, Juniper Blood tells us. And most of us are slaves to capitalism and too reliant on technology to be able to go back to basics anyway.
It’s not one big, depressing lecture – though the decision to have the auditorium brightly lit throughout suggests it wants to be taken seriously. In fact, this production directed by Barlett’s regular collaborator James Macdonald is really very funny. But for a play that holds a mirror up to the gaping chasm between idealism and pragmatism, it has some disparities of its own. Though rivetingly performed all round, several characters become wildly different people between its three acts, while its form is slippery too.
Middle-aged couple Ruth (Hattie Morahan) and Lip (Sam Troughton) have left behind the Big Smoke to plough Ruth’s inheritance into setting up an organic, regenerative farm. But designer Ultz’s set of rotting decking perched on a mound of real, unkempt grass suggests they’ve got a long way to go, while a picnic propped up by bottles of shop-bought rosé raises questions over how ready they are to go off-grid.
The bulk of the first act unfolds over an uncomfortable garden dinner party, where Ruth and Lip share their vision with Ruth’s surly, volatile ex-step daughter Milly (Nadia Parkes) and her brainbox friend Femi (Terique Jarrett) – both visiting from London – and the couple’s woke-slamming neighbour Tony (Jonathan Slinger), who fairly raises valuable arguments about organic methods being a luxury many farmers can’t afford.
Unusually for a two-and-a-half hour play, there are two intervals. And we return from the first to a set up less political drama, more rural soap. Six months have passed, and a far more affable Tony is cracking on with a pregnant Ruth, who’s fed up with Lip’s lofty visions not translating into labour. Lip, meanwhile, has become something of a misty-eyed conspiracy theorist, smashing up his phone and claiming he wouldn’t want their baby to receive any form of hospital treatment.
I won’t give too much away about the third act, which jumps forward by a couple more years, except to say it’s here Bartlett brings the whole thing back to capitalism and cannily points out that those with the purse strings ultimately decide what happens to the land. To readdress the inconsistent character niggle though, a Milly who didn’t even want to sunbathe near bugs and insects at the start is now happy as a mucky farm hand, which feels a stretch.
Still, Bartlett’s dialogue is always scorching, and as ever he does a fine job of making the political personal. There are echoes of his earlier play Albion in Ruth and Lip’s rural dream, and nods to both Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem to a late vision of Lip as the staunch self-appointed ruler of a patch of land under threat of being reclaimed.
Juniper Blood (it is not especially obvious what the name means) flags the sheer impossibility of creating a private utopia inside a wider capitalist economy without attempting to offer any answers. And if its message of ‘hey, if you’re considering quitting the rat race, I wouldn’t just yet’ is bleak, it's still a fair reality check.
