Lots of doom and gloom down on Sussex farm

“There’s something nasty in the woodshed” will be heard when Radcliffe Drama Group stages Cold Comfort Farm by Paul Doust, based on Stella Gibbons’ comic novel, published in 1932.

It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time by writers such as Mary Webb.

The production has everything from cows to warming pans as a cast of many recreate this weird but wonderful story.

It tells the story of orphan Flora Poste who is looking for some relatives to live with.

After rejecting a number of others, she chooses the Starkadders, relatives on her mother’s side, who live on the isolated Cold Comfort Farm, near the fictional Sussex village of Howling.

Greeting her as Robert Poste’s child, they take her in to repay some unexplained wrong-doing done to her father.

Each of the extended family has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear; and the farm is badly run — supposedly cursed — and presided over by the unseen presence of Aunt Ada Doom, who is said to be mad through having seen “something nasty in the woodshed” as a child.

Flora, however, a level-headed urban woman, applies modern common sense to their problems and helps them all adapt to the 20th Century.

Directed by David Darby and produced by Sarah Taylor it can be seen in Grange Hall, Radcliffe, from Tuesday, November 9, to Saturday, November 13, at 7.30pm.