Cast Announced For The World Premiere Of The Farmer’s Wife At Theatre By The Lake

Theatre by the Lake has announced the cast for the world premiere of The Farmer's Wife, a new play by Hannah Khalil inspired by Helen Rebanks' Sunday Times bestselling memoir of the same name.

The production brings together three actresses across three generations of a farming family: award-winning West Cumbrian performer and writer Christine Entwisle, whose credits include the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court; soap veteran Roberta Kerr, known to audiences from Coronation Street and Emmerdale; and fellow Cumbrian Eireann Devlin, familiar to younger viewers from CBBC's The Dumping Ground, who was recognised by the Women's Prize for Playwriting last year. The casting of local talent in Entwisle and Devlin reflects the theatre's long-standing commitment to nurturing homegrown Cumbrian voices.

Staged in the round by an all-female-led creative team, the play unfolds over a single day on a working Cumbrian farm, following a grandmother, mother and daughter as they navigate a life shaped by the land. Drawing on the real experiences of women within the local farming community, it sets out to capture both the beauty and the burden of that existence.

Khalil, whose previous work has been staged by the National Theatre of Scotland, the RSC and the Globe, and who currently holds a writer-in-residence post at Bristol Old Vic, has described the piece as a tribute to the hidden labour of farming women — among them, she says, her own grandmothers. Direction comes from Theatre by the Lake's Artistic Director and joint Chief Executive Liz Stevenson, whose past work includes Steel, Brassed Off and the Olivier-nominated Barbarians.

For Helen Rebanks, seeing her memoir transformed into a new work for the stage carries particular weight. She described the experience as both thrilling and humbling, praising Khalil's ability to shape her own story — and those of other farming women — into something with genuine emotional depth. She singled out Stevenson's willingness to listen to both her ideas and her early apprehensiveness about the project, and said the play represented an opportunity to give voice to farming women at a time when agriculture faces some of its greatest challenges in living memory.

It is not the first time the venue has drawn on the Rebanks family's writing: a decade ago, Theatre by the Lake staged A Shepherd's Life, adapted from the memoir by Helen's husband, the regenerative farming advocate James Rebanks. Stevenson described the new production as a "theatrical love letter" to the Lake District fells, promising a highly stylised staging that evokes the landscape itself.

Running alongside the play for the duration of its run will be Forty Farms, an exhibition by photographer and Cumbrian livestock farmer Amy Bateman, documenting a year in the life of forty farming enterprises across the county. Among those featured is Helen Rebanks herself, whose own farm forms part of the wider portrait Bateman has assembled of a landscape — and a way of life — in flux.