The Reapers Year (revival), Eastern Daily Press

Forget the Constable country, chocolate box images of placid rural life in days gone by.   Come to terms instead with the sweat and toil, squalor and hunger, poverty and exhaustion which was the agricultural worker's lot in Britain even within living memory.

The Reapers Year is both drama and documentary, where there is no place for either sentiment or for blame, but merely the aim of telling the story as it was according to the documentary evidence of the time.

Yet within that frame there is still room for gutsy laughter and stoical humour, and for veins of lyricism which touch the heart.

It is 11 years since the company's founder-director, Ivan Cutting, wrote and staged this play, with its wonderfully evocative music and songs by Pat Whymark.

Today play and production again come up vibrantly.   Again Mr Cutting directs - and as freshly and tightly as if on a new piece.

He and his invigoratingly strong and versatile cast of four give the whole things a sinewy fluency, a momentum as inevitable as the seasons,, and the authentic heart-beat of ordinary country folk fighting against the odds.

Here is a tale of the poor in the last century and this being ground into yet more abject poverty by enclosure, by machinery, by flint-fisted farmers.   And of men and women through the decades leaving these shores in the hope of a better life in the New World.

Rosalind Paul and Jules Davison are the magnificent women, full of work and hope and inner strength;  Mark Frost is the spirit of rebellious youth; William Haden outstanding as the representative of age and wisdom; and Neil Gore, as singer and guitar accompanist, a little ensemble on his own.   This is Eastern Angles at their best.   Catch them during their Norfolk tour if you can.

C V Roberts, EDP