ROOTS

Back in the 1950s, theatre quite literally came out of middle-class drawing rooms and moved into the kitchen. Arnold Wesker’s marvellous 1959 play Roots opens with Jenny washing up in an old butler’s sink, decades before they became the last word in vintage chic.

In Hildegard Bechtler’s wonderfully authentic, murky cottage kitchen in the depths of Norfolk, washing is hanging above the range where a loaf is baking. A photograph shows the ploughed field outside. Jenny and her husband don’t have much, but they question nothing.

So when Jenny’s sister, Beatie, breezes in from London, where she lives with her boyfriend, Ronnie, bursting with Ronnie’s ideas about how ordinary people can enjoy painting and classical music and make love in the afternoons, Jenny and Jimmy look rather bemused. They feel hard-up, have no electricity, but they don’t consider themselves intellectually deprived.

Nor do her mother or her father, another exhausted farm labourer, similarly plagued with gut ache. Indeed, her stoical mother indulges her daughter, even when Beatie rants at her about the absence of books or conversation.

‘I fed you. I clothed you,’ she says, as resentful as her daughter, but she nevertheless helps her to fill the tin bath with buckets of hot water in the afternoon – such decadence.

Jessica Raine, the bright-eyed star of Call The Midwife, plays Beatie with terrific spirit and energy, leaping on to a chair to deliver Ronnie’s socialist and romantic notions for a bolder, freer, more enjoyable life.

Wesker has great fun with the idiocies of everyday chat in broad East Anglian accents. As the mum, the remarkable Linda Bassett puts ‘glass’ cherries on the trifle and measures out her life with every passing vehicle: ‘There goes the three o’clock bus,’ she grunts to herself.

While charting the intellectual and emotional awakening of a young woman in the 1950s, Roots also captures a moment in British history before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and depicts a part of rural England that is so out of touch with London that it may just as well be a Third World country.

James Macdonald’s characteristically painstaking, atmospheric, superbly performed production takes its time, allowing long silences while floors are swept, potatoes peeled, tables wiped and cake mixture beaten. And the tension mounts as everyone arrives for the specially prepared dinner when they are all going to meet Ronnie. It is only when Beatie is horribly humiliated that she stops parroting Ronnie’s cant and finds her own voice.

‘I’m not quoting. I’m beginning, on my own two feet,’ she says, eyes shining. It’s the first step, possibly, just possibly, away from the kitchen sink where the rest of the women remain chained.

Quietly thrilling. 

Until 30 November at Donmar Warehouse Theatre, Earlham Street, London WC2: 0844-871 7624, www.donmarwarehouse.com