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Jen Barnett reviews The Great British Country Fete at Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol

You know a show is good – be it theatre, film, television, or any other medium – when you quote lines from it for most of the drive home, while sitting in the living room amidst people who didn’t see it, on Twitter and Facebook, and to yourself. That’s what has happened to me with The Great British Country Fete.

This Bush Theatre production, written by Russell Kane and with songs by Michael Bruce, is the tale of Upham, Suffolk. Upham is set to become a giant Tesco, with walls all around and a Perspex roof covering the whole thing. Farmer Joe, played by Graham Lappin, organises the ‘fête of our fate’ to protest the Tesco takeover plans, which include an £11.5 million buyout of Joe’s own Cameltowe Dairy Farm. The show is good in spite of this premise, and the over-the-top fake Suffolk accents the cast put on at the start.

The bulk of the play is Joe trying to find something that proves his village is worth saving. Gabriel Vick and Katie Brayben take on most of the other roles throughout, showing their flexibility and stamina. What the audience gets is a cavalcade of everything that’s wrong with rural life. Racism, xenophobia, and dead ferrets combine in this village of the damned.

There are a lot of stereotypes played on in the show (the gay son wanting to move to Brighton, the academics who have documented African war victims, the vicar who likes mud wrestling teenage boys, the one-person NFU splinter group, the Clapham transplants who can always go to the ATM and ‘draw out an emergency thou’ if their goat-biotics don’t sell enough), but they are twisted just enough to provide some new laughs.

It was clear that the play had some revisions since the flyers had been printed. Don’t expect to see the ‘murderous marrow growers’ or ‘”special” Brownies’, because they seem to have been edited out in favour of other characters. I do question that decision, as there were a few characters that slowed an otherwise great pace and that could easily have been edited out instead. The happy ending of the play seems more tacked on than the musical reprise that comes complete with very appropriate boy band style choreography.

While I enjoyed the play, and enjoyed quoting bits from it all night, there’s not much I can quote from it here without stealing the show’s best punch lines. That said, you’ll come out of the performance with lots of things to laugh about, and many comparisons to make with people you know and places you shop. And you’ll never, ever look at Yakult or white grape jam the same way again.

After the three-day run at the Tobacco Factory, the play is set to continue its tour with the next stop at the Latitude Festival.

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