FOLLOWING its award-winning sell-out run at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, Bobby & Amy – a dark comedy about friendship, heartache and the repercussions of foot-and-mouth disease – comes to Farnham Maltings this autumn as part of a 17-venue tour across South and East England.

Written and directed by double Fringe First winner Emily Jenkins (Rainbow, Edinburgh Fringe; Cookies, Theatre Royal Haymarket) and starring Will Howard (The Archers, BBC Radio 4) and Kimberley Jarvis (Lear’s Daughters, Cambridge alumni Footfall Theatre), this powerful play asks what happens when our way of life is threatened by those who don’t understand it.

It’s the late 1990s: Take That, Tamagotchis, Dip Dabs and Pog Swaps. When 13 year old Bobby and Amy meet, hundreds of cows dot across the fields and the sun always shines. But when foot-and-mouth disease hits the farming communities in rural England and the cows begin to burn, Bobby and Amy’s sleepy Cotswold town faces a catastrophe that will change their home forever.

Celebrating the power of community in times of unprecedented adversity, Bobby & Amy is as relevant to pandemic times as it was at the turn of the century.

2021 marks the 20th year anniversary of the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK. In February 2001, foot-and-mouth was discovered at an Essex abattoir and it quickly spread across the UK. The highly infectious disease plunged the agricultural industry into its worst crisis for decades with over six million cows and sheep killed in an eventually successful attempt to halt the disease.

However, the devastation the outbreak left behind was much more long lasting, with many communities and rural businesses feeling the economic and psychological repercussions for decades after. Having grown up in the countryside, writer Emily Jenkins has strong memories of the horrors of foot-and-mouth disease – the smell of disinfectant, distant burning, and the bright yellow tape strung across every gate and sty.

But, as well as looking at this catastrophe, Bobby & Amy is also a celebration of British agriculture, small rural communities and the huge amount they contribute to the wider world. Currently 69 per cent of land in the UK is being used for agriculture (it was a great deal more in 2000) which provides almost 500,000 jobs to this country, and contributes over 10 billion to the nation’s economy.

Emily Jenkins said: “The day the cows started burning, many communities were changed forever. But, as a Gloucestershire-raised writer and director, it struck me that nothing in the theatre I’d seen – or anything, really – was talking about an event that deeply affected the childhood of so many of us, or about the continuing erosion of a way of life centuries in the making. So that’s why I wrote Bobby & Amy. To talk about what has happened to towns in the area I grew up in and others like it.

“Set 20 years in the past, Bobby & Amy speaks to the present as Britain is once again struck by sudden shut down, isolation, economic decline, and a dynamic shift in the way we live and interact with our environment. But this story is more than that, it’s a celebration of community, nature, agriculture, and the importance of finding your voice and fighting for what you believe in, however hopeless things seem. Bobby & Amy is a story for right now that many will connect to, whether they remember foot-and-mouth or not."

Producer Emma Blackman added: “After a long period of lockdowns and isolation, we’re extremely excited to be sharing this Fringe First Award winning show with audiences again. Thanks to house and Arts Council England’s support, the tour will span across 17 theatres in just under one month. Although South East England is densely populated, over 80 per cent of the area is classified as rural – and we look forward to bringing Bobby & Amy’s coming-of-age story to both the urban and rural communities in the region.”

* Bobby & Amy shows at the Farnham Maltings on Saturday, November 20. For tickets (£15, £12 Maltings members), see https://farnhammaltings.com/ or call the Box Office on 01252 745444.