Review: Harvest at LIPA ****

His outrageous comic caper One Man, Two Guvnors may remain his best-known work, but Richard Bean has enjoyed a prolific run as a playwright stretching all the way back to the dawn of the new Millennium.

Harvest garnered a hat trick of ‘best play’ nominations when it was premiered at the Royal Court (the London one that is) back in 2005, winning its Hull-born creator a Critics’ Circle accolade in the process.

And while it may be 20 years old now, Bean’s sweeping, cross-generational, cross-century paean to Britain’s stalwart small farmers and the challenges they face – one shot through with a fertile stretch of dark humour - still has plenty of resonance. Not least in the face of rows over the current government’s agricultural inheritance tax policies.

Inheritance, control and destiny are at the core of this farming ‘Forsyte Saga’, brought to the stage with warmth, humour and enormous joie de vivre by final year acting students at LIPA this week.

The Harrisons have been farming their 80 acres at Driffield in East Yorkshire since their elderly grandfather won the land in a drunken bet with the local squire.

We meet brothers William (William Teasdale) and Albert (Delaney Blake-Pearson), and their widowed Mam (Loka Garlick), in the bucolic summer of 1914 when war arrives at their gate. The siblings bicker over who should stay and who gets to go to fight, while their horses fare less well in the parallel equine conscription.

The requisitioning of their animals by the military is the first of a series of external forces which inform, or dictate depending on your point of view, the farm’s trajectory over the course of seven scenes, spanning almost 100 years and four generations.

The Harrisons are in no doubt that they and their husbandry of the land are under threat – from bureaucratic demands and acres of red tape, and from suppliers, supermarkets and surpluses.

Above: Albert (Delaney Blake-Pearson) mourns the requisitioning of the farm's horses in 1914. Top: Feelings run high in 1944. Photos by Andrew AB Photography/LIPA.

At the heart of it all is Teasdale’s stoic, pragmatic war veteran William who goes through most of Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’, albeit the only thing his (eventual) centenarian self appears to be ‘sans’ is the legs he lost in the battlefields of France as a young man.

In the 30s, William is the spare cog in a family farming machine run by his angry and frustrated brother and exasperated sister-in-law Maudie (Elena Spaven), the sweetheart William left behind when he went to war.

An impasse over the farm’s long-term future is only broken in the dying (I use the word deliberately) minutes of the first half when William finally finds himself free to realise his long-held ambition to turn the concern into a profitable pig farm.

Bacon literally brings home the bacon. But progress comes at a cost. Can the good times last? And with no natural successors, who will guide the Harrison’s farm into the future?

While the narrative and timescale are epic, the drama itself feels intimate with all the action taking place in the kitchen of the Harrison farmstead, Evie Jones' and Milly Noble’s set receiving subtle tweaks and changes as the story moves through the 20th Century.

Teasdale proves an enjoyably pugnacious fulcrum around which the action turns; a constant, sturdy and dryly funny presence in a world which Bean elsewhere populates with a collection of colourful characters who move in and out of the farm’s orbit.

Above: Ophelia Gourbault (as a vet) and Mia Kelly (Laura). Photo by Andrew AB Photography/LIPA.

Among the most flamboyant are Pranav Viswanathan’s Lord Primrose Agar, the preposterous, tall tale-telling squire who yearns to reverse his drunken forbear's bet and yearns for Maudie’s niece Laura (Mia Kelly) in equal measure, and Aidan Rivers’ Titch.

Rivers has a riot as the blunt-talking, belligerent and highly strung new pigman – a sort-of Yorkshire Yosser Hughes – who arrives in 1979 demanding ‘my own room, a double bed and a Teasmade’ and becomes a member of the extended farm family.

These big, colourful characters – almost entirely male, might demand the limelight, but beside them there are also quietly compelling performances from Garlick and Spaven, and a vibrant turn from Kelly whose Laura becomes William and the farm’s ‘strength and stay’ over the course of more than 60 years.

It’s a long show – the best part of two-and-three-quarter hours, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it. And while Harvest isn’t always an easy watch, it’s a richly rewarding one.