It’s all too easy to denigrate a play (as I often have done) for being “undramatic”. In the few years since his breakthrough, however, playwright/novelist Barney Norris has shown his work to be undramatic in the very finest sense. There are tensions, a gripping sense of important things at stake both for individuals and the entirety of his picture, but these emerge unforced out of characterisation and relationships rather than seismic events. In Nightfall, the revelation in the second-act truth-telling phase almost seems a bit much by Norris’ standards, but he buys that moment by remaining true throughout to the four personalities onstage.

The four are brother and sister Ryan and Lou, their mother Jenny, and Ryan’s best friend and Lou’s ex (as we begin) Pete. We meet them as Ryan and Pete are trying to tap into an overground oil pipeline which runs across the family’s Hampshire farm. It serves as an initial flashpoint, but becomes one more pretext for the various parties’ means of dealing with the loss of the family’s father from cancer and Ryan and Pete’s involvement at around the same time in a criminal assault. All four are tangled up in an assortment of ways, but matters coalesce around Jenny’s attempts to control the narrative both of the family and of all its members. Claire Skinner turns in a beautiful, slightly unsettling performance as someone who usually comports herself reasonably but at the same time often sounds worryingly unbalanced. Ophelia Lovibond’s touching Lou is the most confused and uncertain, yet in some ways also the most mature for her candour in facing up to this.

It’s a small dramatic canvas for a venue like the 900-seat Bridge. Director Laurie Sansom squares the circle skilfully, though Rae Smith’s stage design of the farmhouse garden with pipeline and septic tank is sometimes unhelpful in providing far too much upstage space in which actors’ voices get lost, particularly in the opening scene. Norris’s trademark, however, shines through like one of the evening stars Sion Daniel Young’s Ryan occasionally contemplates: it is an unstinting compassion for every figure he draws, in a world which is not morally brutal but simply tends not to notice them.

Written for the Financial Times.