Pavel Pryazhko’s play seems to shimmer between several levels of interpretation as you watch it. You sit there, thinking, “Yes, it’s entertaining, but it doesn’t seem to have any undercurrents. But they’re teenagers picking apples, there must be a sexual dimension… These power plays, are they a comment on Belarus [the author’s homeland]? But what? Or is it still sexual competiti— Ah, now, that’s obviously… Or is it…?” And so on, and so forth. But none of it detracts from the gently humorous hour-long surface portrait of a quartet of young workers in an orchard.
    
I say “workers”: they are so useless they don’t even know how to nail a board back on to the bottom of a broken crate. Officious Valerii, blundering Egor, coquettish Lyuba and cautious Ira converse almost entirely in banalities as they pluck a crate or two of apples off the strings on which they hang on Tom Piper’s functional set.
    
Since his retirement as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Michael Boyd’s only British theatre productions have been for this less-than-100-seat studio attached to the Theatre Royal in Bath. He feels especially comfortable on this project, returning to the Russian theatre culture in which he did much of his training and early work. He seems to invest more in the slapstick of hammered thumbs and collapsing ladders than in flagging up the “one bad apple” metaphor and other such devices, but that is because to do the latter would originally have been to risk both the production and the freedom of those involved; this continues, notoriously, to be the case in the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus.
    
And so nothing is stressed here. Even at the end, when crates, apples, trees and (on press night at least) even the artificial lawn tumble chaotically around the stage, you think it must be an emblem of the rottenness of Belarussian society, that it’s not simply a young generation who are hobbled by ignorance and incompetence but the whole shebang; yet it could simply be nothing more than – as Pryazhko claims – a fascination with the concept of entropy. It doesn’t gleam with a solid light of insight, but it sparkles pleasingly.
  
Written for the Financial Times.