Published: 13 October, 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN

A play entitled Country Life may sound as if the audience is in for an evening of farmers and wenches, or perhaps tennis-playing chaps and girls in pearls. Far from it.

Peter Briffa’s black comedy starts with everything in the garden looking lovely, but, before long, from the grass comes the hissing of an awful lot of snakes.

The three characters round the tea table won’t see 70 again, but they’re not too old to get up to mischief – and maybe murder.

The supposedly sweet old lady is played by Marji Campi, late of Coronation Street, EastEnders, and Brookside.

Will her fans find something similar at Country Life?

“Well, they won’t have to wait six months to get the complete story!” says Briffa.

“Here they’ll see it all in two hours. But, besides that, the play is darker and more complex.

In a soap opera, characters are defined by one or two characteristics; you don’t see them change.

I’d like to think that, at the end of this play, the audience will have seen a whole range of emotions in these characters, who are old but haven’t given up.

“They still want things, they have ambitions.

I hope young people who see the play will look at the older people they know and think there might be more to them than the person they see now.”

Talleyrand’s observation that language is given us to conceal our thoughts could be the epigraph for Country Life as well as for Siren, Briffa’s two-hander for a prostitute and client that recently had a run on the Camden Fringe.

The characters in both plays reveal themselves bit by bit in clipped, cryptic dialogue, qualifying what they said earlier and explaining why it wasn’t really a lie.

Audiences have to decide whether they are hearing the truth and, if not, what the lie reveals about the character, as if Pinter had edged his way into Agatha Christie.

Briffa, 48, has been a journalist as well as a playwright (he was the Big Brother correspondent for the News of the World) but will soon be taking up a new day job.

He was always impressed with how much his father, an anesthetist, loved his work, and, in a career move not a million miles distant, is studying to be a clinical hypnotherapist.

Along with helping people to lose weight or stop smoking, he will deal with anxieties and phobias.

“Hypnotherapy works by replacing negative emotions with good ones. You try to take the patient back to a time when he wasn’t upset by whatever is distressing him now, or when he didn’t have his bad habit, and he was happy. You’re, in effect, reordering their memories.”

Perhaps Briffa finds it congenial since the process is similar to what he does with his characters. But could hypnosis itself – or perhaps a hypnotist whose aims differ from those of his patient – be a subject for a play?

“Hmm, I never thought of that,” says Peter Briffa. Perhaps he means it.

• Country Life is at the Old Red Lion, 418 St John Street, EC1V 4NJ from October 18 to November 5. Tickets on 020 7837 7816