Bentwater Roads: The Times

Once upon a time there was a place by a bend in a stream a few miles from the Suffolk coast that was sacred to the Ancient British. In Christian times it became a church, but a church without a village because the only reason for building it there was to smother its pagan importance. Much later a US airfield spread over the site, and engines were tested in an acoustically sealed hangar locally known as the Hush House.

In this extraordinary building, shaped like a cube with a tunnel sticking out at the back, Eastern Angles is staging the latest play by Tony Ramsay. Doing so means a temporary break in the company practice of touring the region's village halls and barns, but the possibilities of the space were rightly impossible to resist, and Ramsay creates an engrossing drama from the numerous pasts lurking around it.

He chooses four episodes - from Roman Britain, the Middle Ages, the USAF use of the airfield, and today - but none stays isolated from the others, and the way Ramsay subtly (and in one case thrillingly) links events adds greatly to the pleasures of the evening. In the contemporary scenes Nadia Morgan's troubled Charlie has returned in her yellow camper van to her mother's home where once again she is badgered by maternal criticism. But we soon suspect that the mother (Pamela Buchner) is dead and that Charlie's troubles are memories she can't forget along with others, to do with her vanished father, she seems unable to remember.

This is engrossing stuff and our way to its resolution takes us through ritual sacrifice in pagan times, the building of the church's tower, and a US pilot's doubts about flying a plane fitted with nuclear warheads. These matters may sound remote from each other but the play finds connections and most satisfyingly binds them together.

The audience sit on banks of seats installed at one end of the building and Ivan Cutting's direction makes striking use of the gaping tunnel facing us. Characters approach along it as if emerging from a dawning memory. The wooden cage that encloses the willing victim becomes the church tower, where one of Cutting's many vivid details has the sound of masons dimming as the tower is climbed.

Peter Sowerbutts gives notable performances as an outraged USAF commander and a sardonic neighbour but all the playing is strong, and the presence of a non-speaking chorus, drawn from the local community, gives added conviction to the village scenes.

Jeremy Kingston