Rough edge in Lie of the Land

10 April 2012

We all dream sporadically of escaping the city for a rural idyll but if we suddenly found ourselves gifted all the time and space we’d ever wanted, would we relish them? Or would we just go quietly mad? Torben Betts, inspired by his own move from London to Berwick-upon-Tweed, gives us a spare and elegantly poetic 60 minutes on the topic.

The niftily punning title suggests that nothing is going to be quite the way Him (Chris Harper) and Her (Emily Bowker) envisage it, even as they gaze in nervous rapture at their huge new house by the sea in the middle of nowhere. For a start, there is festering class resentment between the couple, as well as a shared inability to slough off their long-learned metropolitan freneticism. To cap it all, things outside their hermetic little realm are starting to get Biblical, and not in a good way.

Talented young director Adam Barnard has come up with a production as stylish as Betts’s writing. Inter-scene summaries of the couples’ actions are wittily projected in the manner of dialogue screens in silent films, and Harper and Bowker graffiti the black walls and floor with haunting and primitive caveman‑style chalk drawings, signifying a return to ominous feral roots.

The actors, a real-life couple, are neatly matched here in a marriage of mutual insecurity. Bowker busies herself with a never-ending sequence of the most highly-strung relaxation exercises you’re likely to see, whereas Harper gets himself into a frenzy reading of centuries-ago bloodshed on the very spot where he’s failing to catch any trout. Maybe it’s not time to leave London quite yet.

Until 2 May. Information: 020 7503 1646, www.arcolatheatre.com.

Lie Of The Land
Arcola Theatre
Arcola Street, E8 2DJ

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