"Fêtid". Pilch.

There’s something nasty in the woodshed in Headingham, and it all comes spilling out the night before the annual village fête.

Fêtid starts off looking as though it’s going to be a gentle tale of country folk, like a bumper edition of The Archers. But it ends up more like Emmerdale on acid, as age-old recriminations, feuds, treacheries and concealments come rising to the surface in one tumultuous night, like courgettes in summer.

The background music while the audience take their seats is a collection of haunting English country ballads so beguiling I was on the verge of asking the sound guy for the playlist. And this theme is picked up by Faye James’ lyrical guitar, strumming and singing while the characters gently dig their allotments.

However, English idylls do have a habit of masking uglier truths. And in Fêtid it doesn’t take long for utopia to evaporate. The first sign is some particularly spiky nettle tea, and before long alcoholism, infidelity, neglect, grievous bodily harm and arson are running rampant through the cabbage patch.

This is all well-produced, well-acted and impressively staged (even despite Balliol College, owners of the Pilch, confiscating the production team’s fresh grass at the last minute).

The problem is that it’s all on one relentlessly intense note. Scene after scene, characters bare their souls to each other as if every moment of the play is its climax. With hardly a pause for breath we’re treated to Sue confronting Jim about his drinking, Yvette telling Chris she’s leaving home, Polly begging Mark to admit he still loves her, and even the vicar calling the emergency services. When you’re asked to care about literally everything, you end up caring about nothing.

The sad sight of the English middle classes concealing their passions in pathetic pastimes is undoubtedly a rich seam for tragicomedy. Watching Fêtid I was reminded of what a master of this genre Alan Ayckbourn is. His 1976 play Just Between Ourselves is all about a disintegrating marriage in which the husband is completely oblivious to the fact that his hobbies are causing his wife’s emotional breakdown. It’s simultaneously horrific and hilarious. The secret of making the audience feel that tragedy is not to flop it all out in front of them, but to hide it in chance remarks that hint at terrible depths of despair. There are isolated moments of this in Fêtid: at one point a character says, ‘I’ll be over there with the carrots if you need me’, and her whole life feels summed up by that sentence. On another occasion Yvette stops Chris picking up her smart clothes by shouting, ‘Don’t touch that, it’s French!’ But these moments are smothered by the breast-beating that pervades the evening.

This is a show with a lot of heart. It’s just that it’s all on the sleeve, when it needs to be poking out of a pocket.