Nightfall, Bridge Theatre, London, review: Barney Norris's special sensitivity is lost on such a large stage

This play about grief, rural decay, and a struggling farm in Hampshire cries out for the intimacy of a studio environment

Ophelia Lovibond, Sion Daniel Young and Ukweli Roach in ‘Nightfall’ (Manuel Harlan)

The new Bridge Theatre is a handsome, extraordinarily flexible space and it delights in finding the configuration that best suits the material. It was end-on for Young Marx, the Richard Bean and Clive Coleman play that launched the venue, and promenade for Nicholas Hytner's powerfully immediate take on Julius Caesar. This third and latest production is the first miscalculation.

Barney Norris's four-hander about the paralysis of grief, rural decay, and a struggling farm in Hampshire cries out for the intimacy of a studio environment.

I can understand the desire to win a wider audience for this 31-year-old author whose special sensitivity to love and loss and the value of ordinary overlooked lives has been apparent since the award-winning Visitors in 2014. But you have to ask whether they have done him any real favours in mounting this piece on a wide and deep thrust stage in such a large theatre.

The plot dictates that a raised corporate pipeline run right through the stagnating, debt-ridden farm (the vivid set is by Rae Smith). To get some extra cash, Sion Daniel Young’s Ryan, the son who has been running the place since his father’s death, is illegally siphoning off a little of the black gold, aided by the welding skills of his only friend, Pete (Ukweli Roach).

Yet the emotional subtleties of the piece demand that we hear nuance, and too many of the words get lost in this space. To my mind, the pipeline doesn’t play a continuously dynamic enough part in the proceedings to justify the scale. We could see less of it and still understand why Ryan’s mother Jenny (Claire Skinner) is horrified by the scam and why it amps up her hostility to the misunderstood Pete, the council estate boy/ex-con who took the rap in prison for her son.

The play is very perceptive about grief – how a deeply flawed dead person can be turned into a saint as a form of moral blackmail; the terrible ease with which the expectation of family solidarity can distort into twisted possessiveness. “Now he’s not here you can have the perfect husband,” her daughter Lou tells Jenny.

For my taste, the normally excellent Skinner signals a bit too stagily Jenny’s lapses into manipulative cunning and pettiness as she plots to crush Lou’s rekindled love for Pete. Of course, it’s a black joke that the person who is trying to force the farm onto her children as a responsibility, insisting that it is bigger than they are, does not do a hand’s turn apart from lift a wine glass and ferry out nibbles.

But I don’t feel that you get sufficient sense of how Jenny was as a young, unembittered woman. This makes her belated recognition that she should never have come here less excruciating.

In Laurie Sansom’s astute, beautifully lit production, there’s a bold truthfulness to the rest of the performances. Ophelia Lovibond’s jumpy Lou splendidly conveys the tug between agitation and resolve in her defiance of her mother and the depth of her yearning for Pete and a life elsewhere.

Ukweli Roach plays Pete in a way that attractively confounds all prejudices; the sequence where he makes a spontaneous marriage proposal on bended knee lurches from farce (“F*** off” she says, mistaking the gesture for a cruel tease) to a fantastically stirring fusion of romantic ardour and winning ridiculousness.

Is her brother a bit sweet on Pete too? He’s childishly keen that they form a sort of Three Musketeers and desolate when the couple leave for Dubai​. But there is something so hauntingly lost and bereft of a compass in Sion Daniel Young’s potent performance that it would be hard to say definitively.

A shame, then, that the production is on the wrong scale. I’d say it’s a safe bet that when the play is revived it will be in a studio theatre.

Until 26 May (bridgetheatre.co.uk)