Autumn
The North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford

ALI SMITH’s 2017 Booker Prize short-listed novel was regarded as one of the first post-Brexit works dealing with the ramifications of the previous year’s European Union membership referendum.

Its depiction of an increasingly insular and fearful country, set on erecting fences while petty, pedantic officialdom flourishes has proved remarkably prescient.

Harry McDonald’s timely adaptation of the novel remains essentially true to Smith’s work revelling in the nature of words, but has even broader implications now with nationalistic European movements growing ever stronger and the re-election of Donald Trump, with his alarmingly hostile and isolationist agenda.