Review: JUNIPER BLOOD, Donmar Warehouse

Worlds clash once again in Mike Bartlett’s universe. Lip and Ruth’s pull to return to nature is disrupted when Ruth’s stepdaughter, Millie, and her academically inclined Best Friend, Femi, visit the couple’s earthy homestead. This rural idyll, where the sky is enormous and the trees tell a story of their own, is suddenly disturbed by brutal talks of capitalist wars and nihilism while the economics of permaculture are discussed.

What happens when ecological extremism starts to look like a sensible decision? Should we put our planet before our family? Generations lock horns, blame becomes currency, and the land watches on in three big scenes divided by two intervals. It’s all very Mike Bartlett-y.

The dynamic is as such: Lip and Ruth’s move to the countryside to make his family’s farm into a profitable, self-sufficient business turns out to be far from the fantasy they both made up for themselves. While Ruth begins to struggle with an ever-increasing load, the dearth of life in the soil radicalises Lip into an extreme idealist who genuinely believes that the only way to guarantee a future is to reject polite society and live ferally and fully off grid. All the while, Femi (a MSc student in something agricultural at Oxford) and Millie (lost in her own ways) alter the balance further, bringing their own unmovable stances in the debate.

Lip’s reasoning almost makes sense until Ruth unceremoniously brings us back to reality. Bartlett peers at the disastrous state of the world as he cynically suggests a number of non-solutions. The writing is pliable, meeting lowbrow classism with blunt silence; it’s acidic and rough before it diverts into intellectual alienation and elevated argumentation. Directed with a crystal-clear vision by James Macdonald, it features laser-focused, intense performances across the board. He contains the visuals and lets the loamy script do the work. 

The piece is grounded by an impressive foundation of hyperrealism. Designer ULTZ buries the stage under a mound of real grass, while an accent of reclaimed wood in a lighter beech-y colour acts as the sky. Jo Joelson’s lights stay firmly on, glaring and cold, until the scenes warm up as they wind down to their climatic resolution. The destabilising choice of not lowering the luminosity and the contextual clues of the theatrical pretense interferes with the realism of what’s happening on stage. Besides having real greenery, the actors eat food and mess with soil. The perception of the audience is toyed with just as much as their belief system is (too) gently rattled.

Hattie Morahan starts off being your usual posh Englishwoman who underestimates the undertaking she’s on. Armed with picnic baskets and a gorgeous pasta salad, she welcomes her insolent ex-stepdaughter and her friend with open arms and no strings attached. Morahan’s initial joy is contrasted by Sam Troughton’s immediately gruff demeanour. Nicknamed “Lip” because he doesn’t talk much, he is a quiet observer. Mud-stained and sweaty, Troughton gives off the peculiar vibe of those people you can’t place easily. When he speaks, his poshness overtakes his exterior, adding a further dissociation in the mix. The couple are joined by Jonathan Slinger as the nosy, impolite, conservative, anti-woke neighbouring farmer.

Slinger is so completely, unjustifiably unlikeable, he makes Millie’s rude outbursts pale in comparison. In turn, Nadia Parkes provides a mouthy firecracker of a performance as a young woman whose traumatic past we never truly get to the bottom of. She flips the metaphorical table right away and takes no prisoners. Where she is brash and loud, relentlessly searching for a reaction or any glimmer of attention, Terique Jarrett’s Femi is eloquent and studied. He wields his education like a weapon, instigating a vicious circle where everyone looks down on everyone in different ways for different reasons.

Thematically, the piece holds close many of the topics explored by Bartlett in previous plays, from Albion to Earthquakes and Bull. He offers a variety of viewpoints, from plain commercial pragmatism to environmental anarchy, but fails to take a secure stand. Perhaps that’s the point. Idealism and capitalism are hardly a marriage made in heaven, so the continuous oscillations between the fantasies of returning to the earth (Lip) and playing the capitalist’s game (Femi) to make a change become nothing but a theoretical experiment.

The final visual (which we won’t spoil) is another low-hanging fruit. This did-he-or-didn’t-he ending is far too common to assign it any kind of significance. It’s the lazy option, unfortunately. The play as a whole feels like Bartlett could have gone a little bit further in an exploration of Lip’s radicalisation itself. The characters are mere roles, foregoing the complexities we’ve seen in earlier works penned by Bartlett. We see what he was going for when he pitted Lip’s action without research against Femi’s inexperienced academic expertise. But the analysis remains lacking.

Bartlett seeks to stay neutral as a child’s prospects are being weaponised. Rejecting civilisation ignores the problem by shutting it out, but leaning into a broken system expecting it to magically repair itself is equally dangerous. He tries to bring realism into a fantasy to exploit the bleak captivity of a capitalist society. Ironically, it all comes off as very performative. It’s one of those productions that look good in a program and whose result is interesting enough to appeal to patrons of varying political hues. It generates enough of a conversation to get you going, but is it Bartlett at his best? We don’t think so.

Juniper Blood runs at The Donmar Warehouse until 4 October.