1 September – 11 October
What’s the difference between a ‘soap opera’ and a ‘continuing drama’? Quite a lot if you’re an aficionado of Radio 4’s The Archers, the subject of a smart new play premiering at The Barn in Cirencester. The difference is never made explicit in writer Tim Stimpson’s Haywire but those referring on stage to the world’s longest-running radio drama as a ‘soap’ will be gently put right. If anyone is entitled to write about this continuing drama it’s Stimpson, who has spent almost half his life scripting The Archers and who is plainly in love with all things Ambridge down to the last hay bale. The same can be said for the cast of this affectionate, witty and touching production.
The ingenious framework for Haywire is that radio man Jonty (James Mack) is desperate to become a producer on The Archers. Maybe writing a play called, let’s see, ‘Inventing Ambridge’, and remortgaging his house in order to hire a bunch of faintly desperate actors and renting studio time to record it will be enough to persuade the powers-that-be at the BBC to give him the gig. All this takes place in the present day while ‘Inventing Ambridge’, the play-within-the-play, dramatises the first few years of the programme from its low-key start in 1950 to a show that could pull in an astonishing audience of 20 million listeners in 1955 for the episode in which Grace Archer dies in a barn fire. (Not coincidentally, this was broadcast on the same night that ITV was launched.) And then, within the-play-within-the-play, we have short excerpts from those early broadcasts featuring Dan and Doris Archer, the ever tedious Phil, the luckless Grace, Walter Gabriel et al. So it’s all very meta, with characters coexisting in the present, the 1950s and the never-never time of Ambridge itself.
Each layer of the onion has its tears and resolutions. In the present day, the cast aren’t happy to discover that Jonty has splashed half his cash on hiring Abby (Olivia Bernstone) because she’s an online celebrity who’s busy monetising a break up with her boyfriend. And Martin (Anthony Glenn) has a beef with Adrian (Kieran Brown) because years ago Adrian cheated him out of the title part in some clapped-out cop drama. Meanwhile in the 1950s the actors fret about how little they’re being paid and whether the public loves them for themselves or for the characters they play. And real-life producer Godfrey Baseley (Kieran Brown) directs his secretary to go out and buy toy farms so they can keep count of the number of sheep mentioned in the show.
If all this sounds confusing it can be at times. But the clues are there to spot: an influencer thumbing through her socials online signals we’re in 2025 while players celebrating a pay rise to £12 a week tells us it’s 1955.
An energetic and committed cast are completed by Liam Horrigan and Rosanna Miles with Geebs Marie Williams playing a sound-girl and gofer in both past and present. One of the incidental pleasures of Haywire is seeing the bizarre way in which effects are created, from the sound of a hand squelching in yoghurt to simulate lambing to the opening of an ironing board imitating the creak of a farm gate.
Above all, Haywire, under the nifty direction of Joseph O’Malley, is a love letter to the glory days of radio. Excerpts from The Goon Show or ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’, which was definitely a soap, recall a time when the wireless was central to national life. And that time is not completely lost. When the theme tune of The Archers finally arrived, there was a burst of heartfelt applause from the audience in the Barn.
★★★★☆ Philip Gooden 5th September 2025
photographers credit @ Alex Tabrizi
