Gardens, Universal Hall, Findhorn, 2nd September 2012

JULES Horne’s play about two sisters who share a home and an allotment has had its second run this year at the Edinburgh Fringe, having won a Fringe First on its 2011 outing. The action takes place in front of a shed (no allotment is complete without a shed) in the open air.

TODAY, we’re among the ponds and polytunnels of the gardens behind the Universal Hall, in mercifully clement weather.

Nutshell Theatre's Allotment

It’s a treat to be welcomed by the actors with a mug of tea and a scone with home made jam (rhubarb and plum, if memory serves) before sitting down, but it’s the script and the acting that hold the large audience, ranging from very, very young to fairly elderly, rapt. Dora and Maddy dig their plots and plant their vegetables, telling the passing years in potatoes: “That was the year we had floury Maris Piper, with Pink Fir Apples for salads”.

Gradually as they bicker and quibble and niggle in the way that only siblings can, we being to wonder why they spend so much time out on the allotment. It’s not just the gardening – is it because the house is full, too full of stuff that bossy older sister Dora (Gowan Calder) can’t bear to let go of? Impulsive Maddy, played with a winning fey energy by Nicola Jo Cully, would quite like to grow flowers and make friends with their fellow allotment gardeners, particularly the male ones – but Dora is a hoarder who can’t bear to let go of her sister either. Anyway, flowers are frivolous….

What seems on the surface to be a little two-hander sprinkled with gardening lore and mulched with comedy turns out to have deep, dark resonances worthy of any Greek tragedy. No wonder this play is almost permanently out on tour. If it were a seedling, it’d be an evergreen.

© Jennie Macfie, 2012

Links

• Nutshell Theatre
• Jennie Macfie