Haywire: an entertainingly meta take on The Archers

Cow | Deer is a daring, wordless evocation of the perils and pleasures of animal life. Four foley artists – special effects sound technicians – make noises by alternately moving leaves, hay, water and tinsel and so magically transport us into a meadow beside these two creatures. In fact you can almost smell the wet soil when rain drops start to patter. Bucolic field recordings provide the backing track, and there is a startling jolt whenever they interrupt with a louder, manmade noise, as if we had all temporarily forgotten our human selves.

A 50-minute piece, rather closer to art than drama, Cow | Deer was devised by the rule-breaking director Katie Mitchell in collaboration with Melanie Wilson and Nina Segal. They explicitly intended it as a plea on behalf of the natural world. It is also a powerful experiment in the potency of sound.

The second demonstration of how to replicate the noise of a calf being born is given by a BBC radio foley artist in Haywire. Tim Stimpson’s play has a more conventional cast of homo sapiens but it accomplishes perhaps more of a feat than Cow | Deer. It makes its audience care about the fate of a fictional character in a distant episode of a faintly ludicrous radio drama. For Haywire tells the origin story of The Archers. You may think you don’t give a Borsetshire fig about what happened to Grace Archer way back when, but a couple of hours in and the stalls of the Barn theatre were quietly blinking back tears.

Our story opens in designer Alfie Heywood’s nicely rendered 1950s radio studio, and it seems for a while as if the production is going to lean heavily on period pastiche, but the clipped BBC tones of an era when continuity announcers were assumed to be wearing evening dress can only entertain for so long.

Gradually, though, the drama, directed by Joseph O’Malley, sound design by Amanda Priestley, picks up the speed and purpose of a combine harvester in full throttle. Haywire charts the rise of the Archers behemoth with a wittily tiered structure: we are invited to witness the recording of a play called “Inventing Ambridge”, about the commissioning of the BBC’s long-running “everyday story of country folk”. As a result, it is often crucial to work out whether you’re watching an actor playing an actor, or an actor playing an actor playing an actor. The trick is to identify an accent and hang on to it as if it was one of the bell ropes inside Ambridge’s St Stephens church.

There are some visual cues, but the voices remain the key (apt in a play about radio). Rosanna Miles astounds with her neat role switching, yet all the cast meet the moment. (Some also have the chance to try out as the stars of a time when radio shows went out in Technicolor: Dick Barton, Mrs Dale’s Diary, The Goon Show.)

A renegade obsessive called Godfrey Baseley (played by Kieran Brown) first came up with the idea for The Archers. He was determined to boost Britain’s postwar economy by persuading farmers to adopt modern technological methods – a phrase that picks up the status of an absurd mantra. Haywire’s neatly stacked plot leads up to the night of the broadcast of a fatal fire at Grey Gables in 1955. It was a shock episode, concocted secretly by Baseley to draw listeners away from the launch of ITV the same evening. And it worked: 20 million tuned in.

Archers writer Stimpson’s play appears to be a simple celebration of the world’s longest “continuing drama” (no, it is not a soap). In truth, though, it’s a warm tribute to the versatility of the jobbing actors who breathe life into radio scripts for scant personal reward. As Baseley points out early on, The Archers is a series with no stars.

The applause when the show’s theme tune sounded out proved that the opening-night crowd was packed with devotees, but Haywire is more than fanfiction. As its modern-day radio producer explains, Ambridge remains an interesting English fever dream of “a place you want to be”.

Cow | Deer is at Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London, until 11 October; Haywire is at Barn theatre, Cirencester, until 11 October

Photographs by Alex Tabrizi; Camilla Greenwell