This fantastically brooding slice of English pastoral locations Cecil Sharp, the godfather of folks music who collected 1000's of songs from rural communities, alongside two ladies he met in 1903. They had been half-sisters, Louie Hooper and Lucy White, daughters of a famend singer in south Somerset who, firstly of this drama, has simply died, leaving them drenched in grief.
It's clear why Nell Leyshon’s script was tailored right into a BBC audio drama final yr, starring Simon Russell Beale and Amanda Wilkin. It bursts with sound, from distant birdsong to people tunes the sisters sing as they sew gloves to make ends meet.
However the visible points of this manufacturing are simply as enthralling with Matt Haskins’s dappled gentle throwing shadows throughout Rose Revitt’s easy, putting set, generally lighting up the sisters with the readability of a Vermeer portray to seize the on a regular basis drama of bucolic working life.
Sharp’s assembly with Louie and his appropriation of her songs lie on the play’s coronary heart, although the sisters’ relationship runs deftly alongside it. The manufacturing is paced to perfection by Roxana Silbert and stuffed with delicate however deeply mined feelings, each actor shining of their half.
Music is finely built-in into the script with spine-tingling moments when Louie (Mariam Haque, quiveringly expressive) sings her haunting solos. Lucy (Sasha Frost, simply as good because the extra flirtatious, annoyed sister) intermittently joins in alongside along with her generally lover, John (Ben Allen), to provide the play a bustling neighborhood really feel.
Simon Robson’s Sharp is a slyly manipulative determine, rapidly switching on the attraction when he sees his alternative with Louie. He goes from cajoling her into singing her mom’s songs for him, even when her grief is uncooked, to the full-circle betrayal of handing over a e-book of these songs now “tidied up” and showing beneath his authorship.
Like Jean Rhys’s 1962 quick story, Let Them Name It Jazz, a few Caribbean lady whose music is taken and sung by a person at a west London celebration, Leyshon explores questions across the archiving and possession of an oral custom, capturing all of the nuance within the debate, from whether or not it wants preserving on this formal strategy to if it could possibly stay genuine in that course of.
Sharp, who has since been accused of racism and misogyny, not solely flattens out Louie’s songs however tasks his jingoism on to them. “I see England,” he says when he first hears her sing and speaks of the “purity” of Englishness in her sound, seeing her as a “primitive” power throughout the land, which sounds near Rousseau’s Noble Savage.
For her, songs are additionally linked to the land however with out his poisonous nationalism; as she factors out, the songs had been handed right down to her mom by her “Gypsy” father, who collected his verses via his travels. The place Sharp needs to repair Englishness on to the web page in his compositions, she tells him, properly, that “none of it stays nonetheless” and this side of the play speaks to modern anxieties over nationhood and identification.
The play’s mental explorations by no means overshadow its emotional drama; we really feel Louie’s betrayal and in addition a powerful sense of the sisters’ difficult bond. Louie’s dependency and Lucy’s need to go away creates a rigidity resembling Tennessee Williams siblings. The tenderness between them develops slowly and powerfully, the story ultimately as a lot about their songs, indelibly tied to like, grief, reminiscence and Somerset itself, as it's about what Sharp takes from them.
At Hampstead theatre, London, till 5 February
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