It may be set in a Norfolk village last year but Molly Davies’s highly promising, first full-length play reminds me irresistibly of Edward Bond’s 44-year-old Saved — without the violence.

In 28 scenes and 80 minutes Miss Davies offers a rural complement to Bond’s landscape-vision of down-and-out south Londoners. She shows a flair for creating believable characters, who speak in a terse, unembroidered Norfolk dialect that left me wishing for surtitles. She fixes her gaze upon two working-class 19-year-olds and describes their brief relationship, conveying what hopeful, hopeless longings simmer beneath calm façades.

The girl, Amy Aston, whose unwanted baby seems the ironic miracle of the title and has been farmed out to her granny, Val, is quietly depressed in Kate O’Flynn’s beautiful rendering of passivity, selfishness and vulnerability. The boy, Gary Trudgill, played with fine, lumbering incoherence by Russell Tovey, is a disturbed soldier, on sick-leave, who unbelievably prefers Iraq to Norfolk.

Both have been brought up to expect next to nothing in their impoverished community, where lives are as flat, dull and deprived as the land. Gary’s cash-starved father, whom Gerard Horan invests with alienated aggression, epitomises the general mood of dejection, having lost his farm to foot-and-mouth and teetered on suicide’s verge. Sorcha Cusack’s believable Gran offers the only ray of cheerfulness.

What makes the play so poignant and Bondian is the way Amy and Gary struggle to improve their lives: a dream of life in Brighton fails. Lyndsey Turner’s in-the-round production on a stage needlessly carpeted with turf offers annoyingly impeded views, though scenes flow with seamless ease. Compelling.
Until 21 March (020 7565 5000).