Displays of support and appreciation are all well and good, but I can’t recall when last I saw a play to which pseudo-joyous whooping was a less apposite response. Simon Longman’s play is not in any sense an uplifting work.

We are on a bleak hillside: designer Chloe Lamford has piled mounds of earth at the rear corners of the broad, shallow stage. Behind a glass wall lowers an undifferentiated sky. On the dirt live sisters Becky and Anna, trying to scrabble a subsistence living through sheep-farming... trying and, since this is more or less the present day and they are not running an industrial hyperfarm, failing. At various times they are joined by their truculent brother Ben, incipient-demented grandfather Mick and/or an immigrant who has assumed the name Guy Tree. Their father is an offstage presence.

Scenes are more or less chronological, though there may be flashes back or forward or sudden jumps in time. For this is Longman’s real focus: how, in an environment so spare, with only a few cyclical internal referents and no external ones at all, time can somehow be oppressive and illusory, still and in motion at once. The same things keep happening, from Mick’s repetitions of bad-taste anecdotes out of the far past to Ben’s resentment that things have not collapsed in apocalypse after their mother’s death.

The trouble is that they’re bleak, dispiriting things, and they grow more so with each recurrence. Mick (Alan Williams) is given a wonderful speech about being aware of his decline and wanting to stop time “for you to be brave”, but when Anna (Rochenda Sandall) repeats its core later it is devoid of power. Ria Zmitrowicz’s Becky seems to make a psychological journey in the course of the 100 uninterrupted minutes, but you can be fairly sure that if it were 110, she too would be back at square one. Vicky Featherstone directs with what James Joyce once called “scrupulous meanness”, but no amount of discipline is enough to dispel the suspicion that, presented as it is in London SW1, it may simply seem condescending towards the entire rural component of the country, and above all you may just feel that you will never whoop again.

Written for the Financial Times.