If ever a play and its setting went together it’s here; Bud sits at the breakfast table by the farmhouse fire, here the magnificent stone fireplace in a small dark church basement given light of day as The Burrow.
With barely a prop, Nick Sheffield’s credible performance of Bud’s story easily allows our conjuring of a relationship and a community corrupted by historic and divergent attitudes to land ownership.
Sheffield makes storytelling look easy, and one wonders whether he really is Bud, while he slips in and out of characters in Bud’s story and talks of four-legged chickens like they are the everyday, and not the result of hormone-fed battery hens.
Nick Darke’s script is thoughtful and perceptive, and has much to recommend it as a very human commentary on inheritance and how the ownership of property can distort the balance of power between people.
In this case, between man and wife Bud and Myrna, Bud and Myrna and the ‘sheddist’ occupiers of yonder field, and Bud and Myrna and the local lady who deigns to call and put them in their place in the social hierarchy.
A dark twist at the end is not anticipated. Superb.
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