Working in an onstage dirt patch, ‘Fen’ cast faces hardships and horrors in stellar production

Genevieve VenJohnson, Elizabeth Laidlaw and Lizzie Bourne play a few of the women who sit in the dirt and dig out potatoes in Caryl Churchill’s “Fen.” (Michael Brosilow)

The eminent British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1983 play “Fen” is receiving an extremely rare and impressive revival at the Court Theatre.

It’s a bit of a surprising programming choice. Churchill, now in her mid-80s and a perennial name on lists of potential Nobel recipients, has written plays more accessible to an American audience. “Cloud 9” is likely her most famous one, a humorously stylized, gender-bending take on colonialism. But there are others too, such as “Serious Money,” her evocative verse play about Wall Street (or, rather, the City of London), and I wonder if “Mad Forest,” about the Romanian revolution, might still have a lot to tell us.