PLAYWRIGHT and author Nell Leyshon knows all about a sense of place.

Our connections and relationship to the land are of paramount importance to this country girl who grew up running free in what may come to be seen as the dying days of the English rural idyll.

And no wonder. Born in Somerset, the daughter of parents described as "hippie shopkeepers", she enjoyed a gloriously Bohemian childhood in and around Glastonbury and the Somerset Levels.

It was a childhood in which freedom and individuality were prized beyond the need for rules and regulations, sowing the seeds for subjects she would later explore as a writer.

Now 45, Nell is a busy mum as well as a highly acclaimed writer. Her works include the groundbreaking novel Black Dirt, which was in the running for the Orange Prize, and an impressive body of plays for both theatre and radio.

Although the English countryside remains at the heart of her work, she spends much of her time in urban settings - living in Bournemouth and often working in London or Manchester.

However, the landscape in which she grew up is absolutely central to her recently revived play Comfort Me With Apples, which plays a five-night run at Lighthouse in Poole.

The drama, which won the Evening Standard's £30,000 Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2005, is set in a Somerset apple orchard and explores a family and a farm facing the inevitability and upheaval of change.

Leyshon conjures up ghosts that inhabit the landscape of her youth, bonds that tie people to the land and the recriminations that emerge when old certainties are overturned.

She admits that the setting is drawn from her own memories.

"I was born in Glastonbury and when I was 12 we moved to a village on the edge of the Somerset Levels which was very much a farming community.

"There were 14 working farms in those days, now there are only two. There has been a shocking, shocking change."

The play evokes memories of a not-too-distant past when people could still name varieties of apples like Beauty of Bath, Aston Bitter, Royal Somerset and Morgan Sweet.

"Those names are just like poems," she says, lamenting the passing of a time when fruit like this was prized for quality, taste and inherent goodness and not judged only by its marketability and appearance.

"It's another symptom of a capitalist society where only perfect apples will do."

She likens it to the explosion in plastic surgery. "We can only eat perfectly shaped apples and we're even told our breasts should look like apples. It's the same thing and it's making us feel bad about ourselves."

Nell says she is delighted that Comfort Me With Apples is playing Lighthouse. "I'm really pleased because I feel I'm very connected to where I live and I love Lighthouse and what it does, the things it brings to this area. Although I spend a fair amount of time working away, I'm very much embedded in my community, in the daily life of bringing up my children and living here in Bournemouth."

For two years she has also run a creative writing programme with Vita Nova, a locally based group of recovering addicts, and says the work that's been produced has been remarkable.

"What they've done in those two years has been extraordinary. It makes you really believe in the power of art to transform people's lives."

Nell's adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's thriller Don't Look Now opens at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith and her new play Glass Eels - set once again in the Somerset Levels - starts rehearsals at the Hampstead Theatre in May.

Nearer to home she has been working with Ringwood-based touring theatre company Forest Forge on a co-production with Theatre Newfoundland.

It involves two one-act plays - one by Nell about a fisherman from Poole who takes his family to Newfoundland in 1850 in pursuit of a new life; and the other by Labrador-based writer Robert Chase about a young woman who travels from present-day Newfoundland to Ringwood in search of her roots.

Forest Forge plans to tour the works in the autumn, playing many local and smaller venues across the South.

"It's been an absolute delight to do," says Nell.

"It's great to work with another writer and of course it will reach a real audience, not just a rarified London theatre audience."

  • Comfort Me With Apples plays Lighthouse in Poole from Tuesday, March 20, to Saturday, March 24.