Exuding wit, invention and charm, Farm is a rootsy week one stand-out in the Absolut Fringe. You’ll never have seen sheep dipped the way they’re done here in a simple and imaginative opening. This site specific, warehouse production gently herds and prods the audience into a series of observations and lessons from the land. There’s a real-life horse, a talking cow and hilarious bee harmonies. The pride and condescension of the garden plot nerd is explored and a welly tap-dance morphs into a barn dance hooley. In one of its most introspective and evocative moments, Shane O’Reilly ploughs a furrow with a pitch-fork hinting at the grind, entrapment and loneliness of this seemingly blissful existence. Willfredd Theatre, Spirit of The Fringe winners last year, encapsulate that accolade again.

*****

The farmer and the land have been vilified in Irish literature and in the Irish mind-set for long enough. WillFred Theatre try a more open minded tack with FARM, where docudrama meets art installation, with song, dance and livestock thrown in for delightful measure. The life expounded is less country ideal more gratifying slog which never turns its back on the reality of the situation. Business can be tough, the life can be lonely, the rot of globalisation and global warming laying waste to their best laid plans. But in this finely tuned production from director Sophie Motley, the darker moods are tempered with knowing, chin up humour. The passion of the producer-even on tiny allotments is infectious, informative and delivered with pleasing ease; the movement between segments perfectly placed so as to move us along but not leave the feeling behind; while the immense imagination of the whole affair captures the magic and miry relationship man has with nature.

A rousing dance that captures the satisfaction such hard work can reap is stunningly countered by a silent solo on solitary life; the life and times of a queen bee is lauded in an erotic, ukulele lead barbershop soon after we are treated to the horrors of bovine birth from a first time dam. While the cast meld human and animal elements into their performances and choreography so beautifully, the whole piece elicits a sense of childlike wonder from the viewer – something that is very hard to pull off without cheapening the sense of raw feeling that is essentially captured here.

FARM’s greatest achievement though is its ability to make your soul sing and yearn at the same time. It makes us pine for the simple pleasures, the reality that impedes them and the almost perfect theatrical experience that it embodies.

After being herded into a small room that smelled of hay, to see three office workers playing with toy animals on the ground, I thought I knew what I was in for. I was wrong. “Farm” changes pace faster than anything I’ve been to – from tap-dancing in wellies, to a queen-bee strip-tease, to the dating rituals of Macra.

Shane O’Reilly’s dance with a pitch-fork deserves a special mention, as does Emma O’Kane’s impression of a heifer after calving. Full of surprises, and memories, for anyone from Ireland. Exactly what the Fringe is meant to be: a mad idea, well-executed.

In three words? Dynamic. Balletic. Country.

*****

The audience for WillFredd Theatre’s captivating promenade piece is not so much led through a transformed urban space as herded together towards a rural idyll. We peer into a pen of city property dealers as livestock gathers around them, first through playful suggestion, then in riveting full flesh. What follows is a gleefully eccentric documentary, based on interviews, in which a farmer may discuss breeding cycles and global milk yields while devouring an entire swiss roll, cow birth is described straight from the heifer’s mouth, or a bee keeper leads us into a doo wop cabaret to explain the cruel succession of queens.

With one striking exception – a physical sequence embodying rural depression – farming life comes off as a wholesome fantasy of honest work, social cohesion and shy speakers (John B Keane or John McGahern might interject), rather than the more complex roots of Irish society. Director Sophie Motley’s methods trump the message, though, with a constantly inventive, affectionate and beautifully performed production. On the Fringe, it’s outstanding in its field.

When talking about farming, it’s knee jerk to wax lyrical about living on the land. Well, we all live on the land, be it ever so covered in concrete. The true issue is the yearning to live with the land, an idea that, ahem, is reaped to its fullest harvest in FARM.
 
The audience bovinely shuffle around the warehouse that contains the show, with the usual obstruction of sight lines that promenade theatre guarantees. Myriad scenes take us from an auction house to a lesson in untacking a cart horse; from an urban allotment to a barn dance; from a calving shed to a lonely field that doesn’t look like it has produced in many a generation. We learn without feeling instructed, and the breadth of experience related is as broad as the land itself.
 


The production is perfectly pitched and paced; never patronises or fetishises; the cast are highly accomplished in all they do (particular kudos to Ralph the pony, who one could say was born for this role) and by the time we are all sitting around on hay bales, drinking mead and having a sing song, FARM has given us a feeling of having created a community, while simultaneously feeling its loss in the larger world — a very, very tricky thing to do, and very, very well done.