In My Garden

After a short lesson on why eating people is the future last week, A Play, A Pie and A Pint visits another cursed future in The Garden. It's a short two-hander, well acted by Sean Scanlan and Anne Lacey as a childless couple, living in some blasted hell where an apple tree is a miracle and the grand project of the scientists is nothing more than a distraction from the ecological collapse. Is it my imagination, or does this pint have an aftertaste of apocalypse?

At least the focus is trained on the couple: their sterility might be a symbol of this dystopia's dead flora, but Zinnie Harris' script brings out the half-truths and miscommunications of my old friend, the dying relationship. While I believe that performance can change the world, I am not convinced that it handles major philosophical questions during lunchtime: I love relentless, bleak misery, that refuses to spare the audience, yet worry that nihilism is just a conveniently large backdrop to generate tragedy. In this case, it casts a shadow over the embers of Mac and Jane's marriage, without really adding enough specific detail to be more than fashionable scaremongering.

As a chamber tragedy, The Garden is more engaging. It opens up Mac's trend towards alcoholism, exposes his bluster as a facade for his genuine knowledge that his project was never going to save the world; meanwhile, Jane's fascination with the neighbours articulates her own stifled desire. She does have a history of insanity – any mention of past madness in a play inevitably leads to some kind of relapse – and this provides the pills for the gentle joint suicide.

The associations with Eden – a man and a woman, an apple tree – make The Garden into a twisted creation myth, only revealing the end of the world rather than its genesis. It's bleak, but endearing through the compassion shown by and to the couple, and a gentle glance at the looming apocalypse that faces us all.