Warring outcasts

Are we barmy or what? Our mawkish obsession with the first world war demonstrates that we’re in the grip of a mass delusion: institutional sentimentality. The latest symptom of our death-mania is Nick Dear’s engaging play about the pastoral poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in action in 1917.

Thomas began writing verse aged 36 at the suggestion of his American chum Robert Frost. We first meet the pair in a West Country croft in 1914. Frost is a smug, wily and sententious trustafarian who likes the idea of tilling the earth but stops short of actually tilling it himself. Thomas, a suicidal depressive, is incapable of showing warmth to his wife, Helen, and his three squealing nippers. He regularly takes off on hiking holidays, leaving the missus to rustle up meals from the meagre scrapings of an isolated spud patch. Helen, a pacifist battle-axe, treats her part-time husband with a strange mixture of tooth-spitting rage and impulsive nymphomania. (After he dies, she has an award-winning breakdown while holding his pipe.)

This trio of warring outcasts is supplemented by Eleanor Farjeon, an arctic virgin besotted with Thomas, who writes operettas and who has never been kissed, she tells us, except on stage when playing Guinevere to her brother’s Lancelot. It all sounds pretty gruesome on paper. On stage, it’s a bit more appealing.

Pip Carter’s Thomas is a weird blend of literary whimsy and Greenpeace jingoism: he wants to sacrifice himself to save the topsoil of England that he loves. In a heavy-handed gesture, the Almeida stage has been covered with 600 bags of Miracle-Gro All Purpose compost to represent Thomas’s mulch fetish. The best performance in Richard Eyre’s production comes from Pandora Colin as the nerdy and nunnish Eleanor Farjeon.