There is very little shade in the garden of Blackwell; a historic lakeside country house where a dark comic drama is unfolding.
“There were two sisters. They were very different. Completely different. Like chalk and chips.”
Two sisters clomp about in wellies and sun dresses, tending an allotment at the bottom of the garden; their escape from a cluttered and chaotic home. Dora and Maddie climb onto a garden shed, where they stand hands on hips, peering down. The buttercups on the lawn look like glowing fairy lights in the afternoon sunlight, but the sisters’ attention is focussed on the vegetable patch where a Cindy doll has crash landed. There’s no hope for the unfortunate Cindy; the failed parachute is removed and she’s buried under a a pile of earth.
“The allotment was here. Next to a tall wire fence. To keep boys out and plants in.”
The sisters tend their vegetable patch with a complicated mixture of love and resentment in front of a live audience. Over the course of an hour the allotment becomes a battleground when they fight, a safety net when one of them falls, a grave when one of them dies. In front of Lake Windermere their comedy drama of sibling dynamics plays out to a bitter end.
“The worms found the new obstruction and worked around it.”
This is the first outing of the drama Nutshell‘s ‘Allotment’ since the Edinburgh Festival where it won a Fringe First award and was spotted by Mike Jones, Head of Performing Arts at the Brewery in Kendal. The play is particularly suited to terrace garden of Blackwell, a house synonymous with the Cumbrian Arts and Crafts movement. The small scale domestic drama is an obvious contrast to the grandeur of the country house.
Nutshell’s Allotment is one strand of the five day Brewery Arts Free Range Comedy Festival which combines big stand-up names like Jeremy Hardy and Jack Dee with emerging acts and sketch shows. Now in its second year, Richard Foster, the Brewery’s Chief Executive, says the Kendal festival was conceived to be freerange in every sense of the word. “The aim was to roam freely across the landscape and across comedy too. There are a lot of festivals now and we had to distinguish ours from the others.”
And this being a ‘free range’ festival, the gigs come about in an organic way. When scouting for last years inaugural festival Richard heard comic Laura Mugridge mention during her act that she dreamt of doing a gig on top of a mountain. He immediately offered to provide the hill and an annual comedy pilgrimage up Gummers Howe was born. (This year Bob Slayer led the chaotic hike.) And when Richard and his team heard that Scottish comedian Phil Kay was “a bit of a biking addict,” they offered him a triathlon of a children’s show, a bike tour of Grizedale with a show on route, and a stand up show at Wheelbase; the UK’s biggest cycling store.
This festival is exactly what a rural theatre in Cumbria should be doing. After all, if the RSC’s Globe Theatre had the natural resources of the Lake District on its doorstep you can be sure Caliban would be reeling off his lines from The Tempest in Millican Dalton’s cave and the witches of Macbeth would be stirring their cauldron at Long Meg.
Blackwell’s Director of Marketing and Communications Jeanette Edgar hopes Nutshell’s Allotment will plant the seed for a long term partnership with the Freerange Comedy Festival, “It’s an amazing backdrop for a production and we hope it will introduce the house to a new generation.” But in Cumbria an outdoor venue is always a gamble, “Last week I feared we might have to hand out umbrellas to shelter people from the rain.”
“We’re symbiotic, like pines and fungus. I’m part of you. You carry me around.”
The two women in the play don’t forge such a good partnership. Dora comes back to haunt Maddie, and when she criticises her sister’s appearance Maddie retaliates by building a scarecrow with her dead sister’s coat, hat and dress, leaving her shivering in the grave.
“And Maddie placed a medlar in memory of Dora, the sourest fruit on earth.”
As the worms consume the final remains of the sisters’ relationship, the sun beats down on the pop-up allotment. The audience do snap open some umbrellas, but only to stop themselves from from burning. As the plot darkens, the shed is framed by the lake and backlit by the sun. And freerange comedy blooms.
Do you like your arts inside or out or inside out?
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