What can we learn from an on-stage farm?
Sam Troughton as Lip, a son of the soil whose nickname satirises his taciturnity
Marc Brenner
Digging for Britain
Juniper Blood
DONMAR WAREHOUSE, LONDON
The so-called “state of England” play – such as David Edgar’s Maydays (1985) or David Hare’s The Absence of War (1993) – applies a microscope to the country’s politics and culture.
Mike Bartlett, at 44 one of the most accomplished of the younger wave of playwrights, extended the genre by making it telescopic, focusing on the future state of the state. Earthquakes in London (2010) anticipated a coming climate catastrophe. King Charles III (2014) – imagining a constitutional crisis when the then Prince of Wales reached the throne – is unusual among award-winning London and Broadway successes in making itself effectively unrevivable: once the title became reality, the plot collapsed.
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