A vital look at the struggles in farming – brilliantly staged and acted
The Carters are losing their North Norfolk farm. Climate change and overfarming have ruined the soil; livestock keep dying; rent keeps rising; and their matriarch is dying. The farm has been in their family for three generations, but they can no longer afford to keep it.
This is the story curious directive tell through Black Sheep, but it, and variations of it, is a story being lived out by farmers across the country. Twelve of those farmers, all from curious directive’s native Norfolk, helped the company develop the play that premiered in Norwich. The result is both a love song to Norfolk and to her farmers, and a slow, masterfully told tragedy.
It’s a play that understands climate change and rural hardship not as distant abstractions, but through the toll they take on real lives. The connection to farming through those twelve collaborators shows in every moment of the production; there’s a lived understanding running through it. This is what theatre should be doing: giving voice to the people who need it most.
Scenes move elegantly between times and places in Zoë Hurwitz’s inspired set, which builds the Carters’ kitchen into a mountain of hay bales. Like all farmers, the family can’t separate their lives from their work. Hurwitz’s design allows director Jack Lowe to stitch together intimate kitchen-table naturalism with moments of striking surrealism.
Lowe’s direction is brilliant. He blends these two modes of theatre in a way that feels fresh and daring. The second half begins with a stunning piece of meta-theatre, and he keeps finding inventive new ways to shift the play’s language. The acting is equally superb. We see the slow, painful unravelling of the Carter family in every performance. Each actor also takes on other roles, all of them vivid and fully realised. Together, the cast uncover deep psychological truth and an emotion that sits just beneath the surface, always threatening to spill over. There’s joy and tenderness too, flashes of light that make the tragedy all the more piercing.
Helen Atkinson’s sound design and Theo Whitworth’s compositions blur the line between the naturalistic and the experimental, mirroring Lowe’s approach. Whitworth’s score is haunting, often led by a distorted woodwinds that sound halfway between wind through trees and laboured breath.
Ellie Thompson’s video design is projected across the set and complements Hurwitz’s decision to dissolve the boundary between the home and the landscape outside. The hay bales transform into church windows, saltmarshes and country lanes.
Black Sheep tells an urgent story with boldness and precision. It is brilliantly written and performed, with a staging full of imagination and care. It is a work of tenderness and tragedy, but also of reverence for nature, for community, and for the endurance of those who live closest to the land. It does exactly what theatre should: tells an important story, beautifully.
Black Sheep is showing at Shoreditch Town Hall until 1st November, and then at Ipswich’s New Wolsey Theatre from the 5th – 8th.