About the Play:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

Winner Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright
Shortlisted for Susan Smith Blackburn Award

Comfort Me With Apples is a full-length drama by Nell Leyshon. Irene's husband has died suddenly and she's falling apart, just like the West Country cider orchard where they lived for 40 years. Irene is confused and agitated, but she's determined not to relax her iron grip over her middle-aged son Roy, and his twin sister Brenda has long been banished from the house. Comfort Me With Apples reflects the harsh reality of 21st century farm life.

Comfort Me with Apples is a bittersweet elegy to the lives of a rural family. Set in the autumn days of an apple orchard in Somerset, the scent of cider apples – Beauty of Bath, Kingston Black, Glory of the West – fills the air. Inside the farmhouse, the rule of matriarch Irene is challenged by her middle-aged son Roy, tired of being shackled to a failing farm, and by his estranged sister Brenda, who returns unannounced to the fold. As apples fall and rot on the ground, bonds of love and to the earth, old ways and legends, are tested in this richly evocative tale about the changing rural landscape.

Comfort Me With Apples premiered in 2005 at Hampstead Theatre in the London Borough of Camden. It won an Evening Standard Theatre Award for most promising playwright during its first run in London, was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring the best English-language women writers worldwide.

Cast: 3 female, 2 male

What people say:

"...atmospheric power and imagination … nothing has so excited or enthralled me in years." — Evening Standard

"...an extraordinary drama of long suppressed family secrets, potent folk myths and an air of autumnal melancholy and decay at a dying cider farm... Breathtaking in its simplicity and feeling." — The Daily Telegraph

About the Playwright:

Nell Leyshon is an award-winning playwright and novelist. Her plays include Comfort Me With Apples, which won an Evening Standard Award, and Bedlam, the first play written by a woman to be performed at Shakespeare's Globe. Her radio plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio and her stories have appeared in various anthologies. Her first novel, Black Dirt, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and The Colour of Milk has been published worldwide. She taught creative writing for many years with marginalized communities, and is a trustee of the Globe Theatre.