Fields, East Anglian Daily Times - Tales Of Fields Is Very Moving.

This is the play that Eastern Angles will tour to nearly 60 towns and villages over the coming weeks, and very apt it is, too. Our fields are every bit as important as people as a link with the past, just as full of clues and, perhaps, just as full of ghosts. Ivan Cutting directs his look back with a keen eye on the future.

His is a moral for our time: the fields have become the good grammar, the syntax of the average Briton. The more we understand and love what they meant to yesterday, the better we will care for them tomorrow.

To carry this message into the countryside he involves us in a village's fight to buy back a piece of common land, Monk's Field, to celebrate the millennium. It is also a detective story which invloves the life of a single mother and her rebellious teenage daughter, a field archaeologist, a monk who puts a local girl in the family way and a mysterious stranger who is possibly an angel.

Played out on a simple, clever Fred Meller set, the story is carried along by some good Pat Whymark songs of which Dangerous Man and My Little Boy Is A Field Watcher are particularly moving.

Kate Romney, Leanne Hailwood, David Learner and Nick Murray Brownplay the parts - and the music - extremely well.

David Henshall