FOUR STARS

Besides the usual instruction concerning mobile phones, a direction to the audience to resist scrumping was added to the pre-performance announcement for Nutshell’s performance of Allotment last week.

“As if we would!” said a woman seated behind me in the sun-drenched greenery of the West Oxford allotments. But surrounded as we were with trees and plants hung heavy with produce — including lots of rosy apples — one might not have been surprised at someone’s suddenly experiencing an Adam and Eve moment.

Oxford Playhouse’s Plays Out programme featured four performances of Allotment, which might have been tailor-made for this adventurous exercise in theatre in unlikely locations. In fact, Jules Horne’s engaging two-hander (director Kate Nelson) was created for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe two years ago (again in an allotment setting), earning much admiration and warm reviews.

Taking inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton (“Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future”), the play supplies an elegiac study — sometimes funny, often very sad — of the relationship between two sisters, Maddy (Nicola Jo Cully) and Dora (Gowan Calder).

Their story is told in narrative form, punctuated by appropriate action — in language sometimes richly poetic and occasionally startlingly direct — as they busy themselves about tasks on their vegetable plot. Dora, we soon see, is both the boss and the supplier of protection to a sister clearly in need of it. “Maddy was a wee bit — well, you know . . .” We do.

Bizarre elements include the ritual burials of a favourite teddy and a parachuting Sindy doll, prefiguring a later interment all too real. A serious fall from the allotment shed and sexual congress within it also figure in this surprisingly eventful piece.

Tea and home-made scones served by the cast preceded the performance. A lovely treat.