In seven short monologues, Shropshire-based company Pentabus explores what Trevor Phillips has called the ‘passive apartheid’ of the English countryside. Excellent performances and some spellbinding writing coincide in a tightly directed and provocative piece of theatre.

Characters range from a young black bar manager to an old church cleaner shocked at a new vicar’s racism, Habib Nasib Nader and Janice Connolly showing their range and flexibility by convincingly playing quite different characters later on. Suspicion of outsiders and the importance of individual choices emerge as themes, as does the moral ambivalence with which we view several of the speakers.

Pieces like Ian Marchant’s Joy’s Prayer and Kara Miller’s Letting Yourself Go recall Bennett’s Talking Heads in their use of precise details whose significance their speaker is unaware of. There are moments of beautifully cadenced, sensually alive writing in Endy McKay’s and Rommi Smith’s contributions.

My one criticism is the tendency towards hasty resolutions which undercut the moral ambiguities at play in some of the monologues. Empathy between rural folk and outsiders may be uplifting but the best pieces are open-ended, directing us to question prejudice and recognise its contradictory faces.