The Farmer's Wife Review: Women's Labour Holds the Farm Together

Hannah Khalil's new play The Farmer's Wife has opened at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, inspired by Helen Rebanks' bestselling memoir of the same name. The production puts three generations of women at the centre of a family farm — and keeps men entirely off the stage.

Khalil's script takes its cue from Rebanks' memoir, published to wide attention in 2023, but the play is its own construction. Where anthropologists have drawn links between the rise of farming and patriarchal social structures, the play argues, through its very structure, that women have always carried a decisive share of agricultural work. The women in Khalil's drama are the ones holding everything together. They are, the review notes, "usually anonymous and often unseen".

The narrative follows three generations of women living and working on the farm. Their unrelenting daily workload exposes the cracks in a system entrenched in tradition and routine. The three characters carry no proper names — they are referred to simply as Young, Older and Oldest, a device that turns them into archetypes of rural womanhood while keeping their individual voices intact.

The cast delivers. Eireann Devlin plays Young, Christine Entwisle plays Older and Roberta Kerr plays Oldest, each described as performing tenaciously. Together they hold, in the reviewer's words, "both the heaviness and joy of an existence rooted in the land" — a land that can be unforgiving, particularly set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world.

The framing is pointed. By removing men from the narrative altogether, Khalil shifts the audience's attention to labour that usually goes uncredited: the feeding, the mending, the tending, the constant invisible work that keeps a farm — and a family — functioning. The Guardian's review, published 25 September, titled its assessment "a bumper crop of tenderness, toil and female strength", signalling a production that finds emotional richness in endurance rather than dramatic conflict.

The choice of venue matters. Theatre by the Lake sits in Keswick, in the heart of the Lake District, a region whose farming communities are the direct subject of Rebanks' memoir and of the play adapted from it. The production speaks to, and of, its immediate audience.

Khalil remains one of Britain's most consistently staged playwrights, with recent work including an adaptation staged at Chichester. The Farmer's Wife continues her pattern of re-centering stories on characters history has tended to overlook, and its run at Keswick gives Lake District audiences a portrait of their own working world, told through the women who sustain it.