Return To Akenfield, The Guardian

FOUR  STARS!

Rural life seldom gets a look-in on our metropolitan stages, but rural touring company Eastern Angles is keeping the voices of villagers alive in this excellent, small-scale, verbatim-style piece that is largely playing in village halls and barns. Catch it wherever you can, because it charts a way of life that has always been changing, but which now is changing beyond recognition. There is a lovely moment when an old man simply lists the varieties of apples that are no longer grown in the old apple orchard, itself under threat because supermarkets demand fruit of a uniform size.

Akenfield, Ronald Blythe's oral history of two Suffolk villages, was first published in 1969 and has been in print ever since. In 2004, Canadian Craig Taylor spent time talking to the current inhabitants of the villages for Return to Akenfield. The book provides the backbone for this show, staged with economy and craft by Naomi Jones on Mika Handley's design, which, with its receding telegraph poles, cleverly evokes the Suffolk landscape.

The show is 20 minutes too long and a touch repetitive in the second half, but what is wonderful is the way it charts without nostalgia a past being erased by the present. As one old-time resident comments, people used to miss Akenfield through lack of interest; now they miss it because of the speed of the B1078. Soon it might be entirely gone, village life destroyed by the effect of Tesco Direct on local amenities, the lack of public transport and the second-home owners. There's no bitterness, just an acceptance that things do change. Return to Akenfield may not tell you anything you don't already know about the pressures on village life, but it does it with immediacy, grace and authenticity.

Lyn Gardner