SINCE their first exciting production, the Gingerbread House, Feral Productions have proved they can be relied on to deliver thought-provoking and engaging drama with a difference. And their latest work, Four Corners, which played to packed houses last week at The Spread Eagle, was no exception.

Not home, not work, the pub is the ‘third place’, a haven for many from real life and Four Corners exactly captured the sense of the pub as a place where who you are is less significant than who you want to be. Opening with a beautifully written monologue, movingly delivered by Rab Handleigh, we were drawn into the drama of a man’s first attempt at a date after the breakdown of his relationship with the love of his life.

Elsewhere in the pub, other small dramas are being played out – the working mother who claws back a precious hour between office and home to be herself, the schoolboy who’s attracted a coterie of nurses, all convinced that he’s old enough for what they and he have in mind …. And the vulnerability and self-loathing of a woman who’s come to meet a man she met at her mother’s funeral is deftly revealed in just a few words. All this cleverly underlined as other drinkers found particularly apposite solutions to crossword clues.

Four Corners closes, as a night in the pub often will, with strangers drunkenly dancing with each other, an exhilarating and exciting end to the evening, a break-out from normal life, a memory to be ferreted away as the cold light of the next day dawns.

Inventiveness, wit, great writing and music are the hallmarks of a Feral piece and Four Corners didn’t disappoint. The pub offers a wealth of possibilities and a limitless range of characters, and Feral took full advantage of those possibilities to offer telling vignettes of lives that are otherwise only guessed at.