In his magnificent 2005 non-fiction book The Farm, Richard Benson heartbreakingly charted the financial and emotional decline of an English farming family.

Playwright Nell Leyshon is profitably ploughing similar terrain here, although she is markedly more sparing with both the figures and feelings.

She has vital, wide-ranging things to say, about the importance of trees, of both the family and fruit variety, and the difference between domestic ties that bind and bonds that shackle.

But just a little more sweating of the small, factual stuff would greatly increase her play's harvest.

Right from the start, we are aware that, Stella Gibbons-style, there is something nasty in the woodshed of the past on this Somerset apple farm of cold comfort, where the family is "living off the bank" rather than the land.

Matriarch Irene's husband has just died, her grown-up son Roy is monosyllabic and his twin sister Brenda has long been banished from the house.

Don't mention what happened, the characters caution each other incessantly in the stripped-down dialogue.

Like a well-shaken bottle of cider, this technique of withholding information is potentially explosive in all the wrong ways.

The revelation of the long-festering grudge, when it does eventually come, is both underwhelming and underexplained.

No one's asking Leyshon to go all Eastenders on the exposition front, but a little touch of the Archers at key moments wouldn't go amiss.

She could also usefully make even more of those poignant, unmistakably Chekhovian overtones, of a family in denial about the fate of an orchard.

Still, it's easy to see why Leyshon's admirably assured, unhurried writing, and profound empathy for her subject matter, won her the Standard's Charles Wintour Most Promising Playwright Award when this piece premiered at Hampstead in 2005.

Director Lucy Bailey oversees an elegant revival, for which Mike Britton's striking inside-out set has earth, leaves and rotting apples strewn around the kitchen table.

A faultless cast of five trample in the mud, headed by Veronica Roberts's formidable Irene.

Dressed in nightie, cardy and wellies, Roberts stomps malevolently about, although her occasional recounting of farming folklore hints at a well-concealed softer side.

Penny Layden (Brenda) and Lisa Stevenson, as old friend Linda, offer fine portraits of middle-aged women stoically trying to reconcile themselves to the intractability of their loved ones. Food for thought, in every sense.