Yorkshire grit

The second half of Harvest, Richard Bean’s new play about four generations of a Yorkshire farming family, opens with the main character, William Harrison, sitting by himself and listening to the wireless. Suddenly, we hear the opening theme music of The Archers and, without hesitating, he leans over and switches it off. Harvest is full of amusing little touches like that. It’s a political play with some serious points to make about the plight of the small British farmer, but Bean is canny enough to leaven the mix with plenty of gags, a couple of romantic subplots, a handful of comic characters and — in the final scene, at least — some genuine suspense. The result is one of the best new plays of the year.

Harvest opens in 1914 with a widow and her two sons, William and Albert, arguing about which one of them is going to enlist and which one is going to stay behind and look after the farm. The matter is settled when a no-nonsense lieutenant strolls into their kitchen, requisitions most of their livestock and declares Albert unfit for military service on the grounds that he started crying when his favourite horse was led away. The next scene is set in 1934 and, predictably enough, William is a wheelchair-bound amputee, while Albert has prospered, marrying his brother’s sweetheart and becoming the head of the family.

Things don’t improve much for William over the course of the next 70 years. He’s constantly at loggerheads with authority, whether in the form of Westminster or Brussels, and after his brother is killed in the second world war the only way he can keep the farm going is to marry his niece off to a strapping Luftwaffe pilot.