Bone Harvest, Evening Star

Ivan Cutting's Bone Harvest bottles the character and soul of East Anglia to bring us a living history.

We join the family in 1997 as Frances celebrates her 100^th birthday.   Her great grandson Ray, a social historian, wants to capture her story on tape, but she is reluctant to reveal much at all. This is a family that holds its secrets close and, as the drama unfolds at both ends of the 20^th century, we catch fleeting references to things left unsaid for so long they have become buried.

Yet in Belgium, the bones of Frances's husband, Jack, and his friend, Eddie, are unearthed after lying undisturbed in a field - 80 years after they died in the Great War.   As they are finally laid to rest, so there is other unresolved family business to be settled. Frances's granddaughters Peg and Joyce, now in middle age, hid their feelings, especially from each other. Peg's cover is scintillating wit while Joyce deploys stoicism.   Joyce's sons, Ray and Ted, don't get on and their cousin Hannah, over from Toronto, applies her transatlantic zeal to the dilemma.

This family is every family.   Only in soaps are family secrets broadcast.   In reality some go to the grave.   Another thread that knits these bones together is the magic of the horsemen.   At the turn of the last century most East Anglians worked on the land and the horsemen jealously guarded the secrets of their skills.

In telling this sublimely rich and entertaining tale that spans almost a century, the players are by turns funny, sad, repressed, wise but always convincing and human.   As Frances, at 17 and 100, Katharine Burford gives a commanding central performance.  When the old lady is patted and patronized, we all wince.   Alison Mead and Barbara Kirby, as the bickering sisters, evoke family life with wit and sensitivity.   Joanna Nuttall is a splendid cousin Hannah, breezing in as a welcome wind of change. Mark Frankum is an endearingly vulnerable Ray and Dean Lepley, who also plays Ray's brother Ted, gives a powerful performance as the womanizing horseman Eddie, while the excellent Carl Prekopp is Eddie's friend, Jack.   Anderson Knight is doubly fine as Joyce's ex-husband Eric and Eddie's father Harold.

As always with Eastern Angles, the set is a major player with images and live video film projected on to white screens that switch up effortlessly between moods and eras.

Writer and director Ivan Cutting has brought us a glorious piece of theatre that illustrates East Anglia's past and its present.   And while we may regret the demise of old skills we can rejoice in the end of old prejudices.

Lynne Mortimer