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Apples are the comforting fruit
COMFORT ME WITH APPLES
Hampstead Theatre
I SAW this play at the Hampstead Theatre in October 2005. It was a class apart and the playwright Nell Leyshon went on to scoop a prestigious newcomer-of-the-year award.
In it, the fruit is rotten, the ground infertile and the relationships dead.
The farmer is no longer self-sufficient. Independent cider orchards are disappearing from the landscape faster than you can pour a pint of Magners.
What immediately struck me about the night is the remarkable set. Half orchard, half house, with a carpet of earth, apples spill out from beneath the bed.
A wood fire smokes out the theatre. When the scene shifts into the orchard after the interval, the boundaries blur once more. The characters don’t know where else to be, they fall asleep beneath a duvet of leaves. The land is home and the home is land.
Unfortunately, for the matriarch, Irene (Anna Calder-Marshall), the land and her way of life are worth more than the happiness of her son Roy (Peter Hamilton Dyer).
A kind of female King Lear, Irene has her favourite, but eventually sees the error of her ways and is redeemed after acknowledging her daughter Brenda (Kate Schlesinger).
But Roy’s late break from his mother’s maternal clutches ends with tragedy. Irene’s brother Len (Alan Williams) plays the fool, full of simple truths and foreboding.
Amid all the family squabbles, he is the one that brings what’s really important – the future of the farm – to the fore.
With a plain plot and few memorable lines, the power of Comfort Me With Apples is in its characters. The nuances of family life smack of authority, each individual with their own agenda but eventually willing to sacrifice for the collective.
Leyshon, a writer in residence at the Hampstead Theatre, set out to depict rural life before it disappears altogether. She has created a mysterious world governed by myth and legend that comes recommended.
Until Jan 27
020 7722 9301
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