Return To Akenfield, The Times

Follow-ups always fascinate. On television they can dip every seven years into the lives of a group of Sixties children, discovering how class differences at birth affect their futures. And in Craig Taylor's recent book, dramatised here, they reveal the changes to a fictitious Suffolk village since its inhabitants told the stories that Ronald Blythe gathered for his 1969 book Akenfield.

Taylor followed the pattern of Blythe's book in speaking to a wide range of villagers and assembling their tales into a sequence of monologues. I had feared this might also be the structure of the play drawn from his book, which would have been interesting but short on verve. But what he and his co-writers, Ivan Cutting and Naomi Jones, have cunningly done is to weave elements of many of the stories into others so that longer accounts vary with short vignettes, and reported speech turns into dialogue. They even bring together a Polish fruit picker and a discontented local girl to make a tale of mutual misunderstanding that surfaces in café, pub and lane throughout the evening.

Jones is also the director of the play, produced by Eastern Angles and touring from now until June throughout, as the company's name suggests, East Anglia. Some of the venues will be actual theatres but the cast of five will mostly play in village halls, church halls, even barns.

Much has changed in Akenfield since 1969. As well as migrant workers there are newcomers and commuters, some of them nostalgics for a rural past, others grimly defined as "they drive 4x4s". Old ways that were shrinking when Blythe was writing have shrunk further, yet a cheering vitality, perkiness and sheer love of the land keep emerging from these thoughtful revelations of modern country life.

On a bare stage where three telegraph poles of diminishing size suggest the fields of Suffolk, the production reinforces the sense of community by having chairs, shawls and bunches of flowers handled by different actors in different scenes. In all they play 45 characters: Sally Ann Burnett and Charlotte Thompson divide the female roles, David Redgrave specialises in old-timers, Richard Earl the arrivistes and Robert Macpherson the young ones. The story begins in an orchard, ends in a graveyard, and the sense of recording human history in all its changes emerges sweetly, sadly, hopefully and stirringly.

Jeremy Kingston - The Times.