Theatre review: Smallholding

Chris Dunkley's Smallholding follows young couple Andy (Chris New) and Jen (Matti Houghton) as they leave London to return to a farming life in rural Northamptonshire, where they both grew up. Jen's brother has bought a plot of land as an investment, and is letting them stay in the dilapidated cottage on the property for free. Their plan to make a modest living growing parsnips seems naïve but earnest, a desperate measure suggesting the demons they're trying to escape are pretty major ones. And so it proves as the next hour or so charts a drastic decline for them both when Jen starts to suspect Andy of slipping back into bad habits (spoilers from the next paragraph onwards.) What emerges is a story about dangerous co-dependence, of people who love each other but shouldn't be near each other.

Theatre review: The Precariat

Fin (Scott Chambers) is a teenager preparing to do his A'levels, and expected to do well as he's highly intelligent and articulate, hard-working and comfortably placed somewhere in the middle of the social strata at school. But if his prospects look good academically, his home life begs to disagree, as he belongs to a new class Chris Dunkley's new play christens The Precariat: A generation growing up into an uncertain future, precariously balanced and at the whim of the global markets. Living with his unemployed, depressive mother Bethan (Kirsty Besterman,) Fin's part-time job at a fried chicken shop makes up a disproportionate part of the family income. And ever since the 2011 riots, his younger brother has got increasingly involved with the local drug dealing gang, the unseen Leo becoming a constant concern for his older brother, whose tragedy may be that he's all too acutely aware of his own limited prospects.