IT keeps raining, the fields are under water, the country has a policy of forced quotas for farmers, townsfolk are rationed to one egg a week, any misdemeanour or farm failure means removal from your farm to work in factories where life expectancy is a maximum of three years … and brutally trained young men are being sent out to monitor farm performance and hunt down the cause of the failing crops – foxes.
But where are the foxes? Has anyone actually seen a fox in years? …
This is the frightening and dystopian back-drop to Dawn King’s Foxfinder, the first of the pairs of short plays in Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s graduating students Summer Festival at the city’s Old Vic. It is being performed alongside Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, set in a drugs trial at a psychiatric hospital. Not a comfortable evening, as you can well imagine.
With a brilliant cast of four (farmers Samuel and Judith, George Lorimer and Lotte Pearl, their friend and fellow farmer Sarah, Nia Johal, and the Foxfinder, William, a scarily SS-Aryan clone, played by the compelling Peter Devlin), the play has shades of other dystopian stories – George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and, less obviously, Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code.
Winner of the 2011 Papatango New Writing Prize, the play explores many contemporary concerns – climate change, food sovereignty and resilience, a surveillance society … it feels chillingly relevant and it offers no easy answers.
Directed by Rafael Solimeno-Harris, this powerful production taps into current fears – the arbitrary ejection of people from their homes and jobs for some intangible or fabricated failure or offence … evoking memories of 1930s Germany under the Nazis, the McCarthy era and the new paranoia around the sackings and expulsions of the Trump-Musk regime.
In the one-act drama The Effect, completed before her hugely successful full-length play Enron, Lucy Prebble explores the complex ethical issue of drug trials in which volunteers submit themselves to experiments involving the use and efficacy of new drugs.
Connie (Violet Morris) is a psychology student, Tristan (Ebube Chukwuma) is a smart but rather directionless young man. They meet in the ward where Dr Lorna James is monitoring their responses and behaviour as she methodically increases the dose of the new anti-depressant. The senior psychiatrist, Dr Toby Sealey, overlooks the process – but is he more interested in the clinical performance of the doctor or the impact of the drugs?
Gradually the two young people are drawn to each other, Tristan open to his feelings for Connie, but Connie more reticent, trying to retain a measure of scientific objectivity. It doesn’t last – soon they are head over heels in love. The boundaries between real feelings and narcotic-induced emotion are explored unflinchingly.
Directed by Lara Lawman, the four actors bring their very different characters vividly to life – who is the real victim here?
Both plays offer alarming but all-too-realistic visions of the world in which we now live. Brilliant performances from all eight actors and some tight and effective direction promise well for the rest of this summer graduating student season. For more information on the other plays, visit https://bristololdvic.org.uk/whats-on/mini-series/bristol-old-vic-theatre-school-summer-festival
FAC
Photographs by Dotty McCormack/Shot by Dot