Comfort Me With Apples, Lighthouse, Poole

Award-winning Bourne-mouth playwright Nell Leyshon brought her brilliant but bleak play about the death of the English countryside to Lighthouse last night.

This revival of Comfort Me With Apples, which won Leyshon the prestigious Evening Standard Award as most promising playwright back in 2005, may feel like something of a slow burner.

But within minutes the audience is locked into its terrible tale of lost hopes, shattered dreams, vanishing myths and how land (just like people) can be brutally unforgiving.

Leyshon steers admirably clear of sentimentality in this story of a family and a way of life in ruins.

Set on a broken-down Somerset cider farm, it finds vicious, controlling matriarch Irene finally facing an end to the years of dominance that has overshadowed her family.

Veronica Roberts is superb as this scheming farmer's wife who finds everything changing when she is suddenly widowed.

Brenda (Penny Layden), the daughter she has driven away, returns, as does another face from the past - banished family friend Linda (Lisa Stevenson). Their presence causes put-upon and manipulated son Roy (Jonathan McGuinness) to finally question his miserable head-in-the-sand existence.

With the bank calling in the farm's debts, Irene is left with her simple brother Len (Graham Turner) contemplating the utter hoplessness of what is left.

With superb cast, tight direction from Leyshon's regular collaborator Lucy Bailey and a marvellously evocative set full of apples and shattered ladders going nowhere, this play has depth, tension and a very dark message. It touches on our pagan heritage, cycles of fertility and the power of the land to give and take away.

Comfort Me With Apples plays Lighthouse in Poole until Saturday, March 24.

A pre-show talk last night found Leyson in conversation with artist, writer and broadcaster Sally Winter. Complete with an audience question-and-answer session, the discussion in the Lighthouse Studio offered an insight into how this talented writer works, her development of characters through dialogue and the concerns that have inspired her career. She talked about the different disciplines of writing books, radio and stage plays, the macho culture of British theatre and her position as that rarist of creatures - a successful female playwright.