This play is audacious. It has audacity in spades. It is more audacious than riding a barrel down Niagara falls without wearing shin pads. Whilst being afraid of water.

Why is it so audacious? Well, it’s mainly the script. It’s well staged and designed, but it is Sam Bailey’s original piece that is significantly different from the usual student fare. It is around ninety minutes of realist drama set in 1982 in Odessa, Texas - the Lone Star State. It centres around a disparate family, brought to the same physical location by the death of their father. You might be thinking so far, so normal. Another twentieth century family feud play.

But you’d be wrong. Firstly, anyone writing and staging formally conventional new realist dramas in Cambridge is one of a handful and it’s especially rare to produce one that one barely hints at the comic. Secondly, it is set at a far remove from the lived experience of most of its audience (and presumably the author’s), in a world dripping with the risks that come with cultural familiarity and closets full of stock tropes. But far more importantly than the other two, the unrelentingly steady pace in which the play unfurls is the work of a dramatist with supreme confidence in his own abilities and his hold on the audience’s attention. And this is, for the most part, justified.

The play opens with the gentle murmuring of cicadas and a character turning on a TV, and its blue haze filling the room. You’re not initially sure what’s happening, as Sam (Ben Bayley) listlessly wanders on to the stage.  His slow Texan drawl is symptomatic of how the play proceeds: unhurried, at its own pace, and often deep. There are very few gimmicks or tricks in the production – the sound of the play is silence, bar the character’s voices, and the lighting is subtle and cleverly directs the audience’s attention. The slow pace and the simplicity of the design help render it both atmospheric and immersive.

It transpires that we’re at Sam’s father’s funeral, and from here on in we’re introduced to the other characters and get fed a drip feed of personal disclosures and sources of sibling animosity. It’s all cleverly plotted and ably performed. The rogue brother Caleb (Marcus Martin) has a helluva part to play and he dominates the stage, with or without his whiskey bottle and gun. The absent brother Matthew (Michael Cotton) is introduced as Pa’s son from Chicago. This is a source of suspicion, but for the purposes of the script and his voice it might as well just be Somewhere Else. That said, his beautifully delivered monologue is the most moving moment of the piece, and comes before a heightened climax that risks jeopardising that which has come before. It eventually comes good, and veers away from clunky, but it’s touch and go for a minute or two. Note to cast: it’s hard to maintain tension when firearms are pointed at each other for arm-achingly prolonged periods of time, even with lots of heavy breathing.

That’s the kind of risk this play often skirts: characters and characterisations being a brush-stroke too broad, or a turn of phrase too obvious. The motivations that initially seem obscure are made clearer in the second half of the play, but emotional gear-changes often seem too sudden and actions aren’t always grounded enough to be entirely plausible. Least guilty of this is Sam, who anchors the play with an understated central performance and a lovely relationship with his ‘wetback’ partner, Gabriela (Francisca Posada-Brown).

So, the play itself has a fair few flaws, and won’t be to everyone’s taste. But it’s highly watchable, well-constructed and deserves a far bigger audience than it opened to. The Red Soil is as good a motif as it is a title: clever and distinctive. Like the play, most of the time. 

The Red Soil plays at the Corpus Playroom at 7pm until Saturday