Sister act — Moira and Fiona Buffini at the National Theatre

Staple of Sunday-night TV dramas, gothic horror stories and detective tales, the country house sits in the corner of English culture like a great ancient oak. Who can resist the mighty fireplaces, the secret passageways and the ancestral paintings staring down disdainfully on the antics below? It’s been a fruitful setting for countless playwrights too — from Noël Coward (Hay Fever) to Tom Stoppard (Arcadia) and Alan Ayckbourn (House and Garden).

The latest dramatist to step over the threshold is Moira Buffini, with her new black comedy Manor, about to open at London’s National Theatre. But for Buffini’s lady of the manor there’s more than a few creaking floorboards to worry about. A storm is raging, the roof is leaking, the bills are mounting and her husband, high on magic mushrooms, is cavorting with an old rifle in the hall. And that’s just the beginning. Soon the house will be host to an explosive mix of strangers stranded by the storm, and those early troublesome leaks will be but a wistful memory.

“It was a desire to write about England,” says Buffini, explaining that she wrote the first draft in 2017 with “the convulsions of the winter after the Brexit vote” fresh in her mind.

“[I wanted to write about] what that revealed to us about ourselves. And about how disunited it has made us feel. I thought, ‘What’s more English than a manor house? Let’s set it there.’ And that gives you all these dramatic precedents. It gave the play its form — it’s an old-school, three-act play set in a manor house. I’ve never written anything like it before.”

“You always have a vicar, you always have the lady of the manor,” adds her sister, Fiona Buffini, who is directing the play. “There are people washed up in the storm. It’s a fantastic plot device.”

There’s clearly a strong metaphorical streak to the piece: here’s a manor house, built after the civil war, falling into disrepair and, as the storm takes hold, increasingly under the sway of one of the strangers: the charismatic leader of a far-right organisation. But it’s also darkly funny and, says Moira, she didn’t set out to write a “state of the nation” play.

“Plays come out of what keeps you awake at night — in this case, the climate emergency and the increase in extremism. But I would never, and could never, sit down and go, ‘I’m going to write a state-of-the-nation play.’ It would be completely paralysing. You [need to] get a bunch of really interesting dramatic ingredients and then it takes care of itself.”

The playwright was last at the National Theatre with wonder.land, an innovative musical take on Alice in Wonderland that spliced Lewis Carroll with virtual reality. Her other stage works include the mischievous meta-comedy Handbagged (about Margaret Thatcher and the Queen) and Dying for It, based on a caustic satire by Soviet writer Nikolai Erdman. So Manor might seem like quite the departure. But, she says, the format is deceptive: the play takes those “very old-fashioned, familiar tropes” and mashes them up with the modern world.

For Fiona, that produces a sort of “turbo reality” that she’s keen to draw out on stage. “The first thing I said to Lez Brotherston [the designer] was ‘We cannot put this in a box set.’ It’s not a straightforward play. It takes all those conventions from a straightforward play and twists them into something else. So we have a set that is a manor house but all off-kilter.”

We are sitting, in the dark of an early winter evening, in a quiet corner of the National’s Lyttelton Theatre. The two sisters sit opposite me: Fiona, the director, taller, curly-haired, older by 13 months; Moira, the writer, watchful under her bonnet of sleek, dark hair. The playwright recalls that she wrote that first draft hunkered down in the National Theatre studio while a storm howled outside.

“I only had three weeks between these big TV commitments,” she says [she recently wrote the film The Dig and the TV series Harlots]. “And for about three days there were gales and storms battering this room that I was in. I think something of the energy of the storm went into the play.”

“It’s like a character in the play,” adds her sister. “It’s this presence. It’s like a living thing.”

You can see why the two are working together: their easy affinity, with one sister often picking up the thought of the other. But how does it work in the rehearsal room? Do they ever argue? Or sulk?

On the contrary, familiarity allows them to be candid without fear of offence, says Fiona. “I can be really frank, I can say things to Moira about the script — ‘do we really need this line here?’ — and Moira can say something back about not hitting a moment right.”

That closeness stems partly from their childhood. Their mother, Susan, was widowed when they were both very small and she was pregnant with their younger sister. Mother and daughters had to pull together.

“My plays are peopled by strong women — I don’t think that’s an accident,” says Moira. “There’s a certain Susan Buffini fearlessness that’s been a great life lesson for all three of us.”

Susan Buffini also introduced her daughters to theatre. As a nurse she worked in a hospital where Michael Elliott, a founding artistic director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, was a patient. He gave free preview tickets to the entire unit, so she took her girls along to everything. And the sisters attended a school that cherished the arts, with every pupil taking part in an annual week-long festival.

That early exposure to great drama left both young women with a hunger for expansive, imaginative plays. Twenty years ago, Moira co-founded the Monsterists, a group of playwrights dedicated to producing new works of range and ambition. Fiona’s recent productions include big hitters such as Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.

The two last collaborated on Moira Buffini’s pitch-black comedy Dinner in 2002. Since then, pressures of work have kept them apart professionally, with Moira writing across stage and screen and Fiona spending five years as associate director at Nottingham Playhouse (although she did direct a revival of Handbagged in 2019).

But when it came to Manor, the playwright wanted her sister to direct “from the word go”. That’s partly, she adds, because of their joint experience of making brutal comedy work on stage in Dinner and the shorthand they evolved.

Like Dinner, the new play moves along a knife-edge between comedy and tragedy. For the director, that means lightning-quick changes on stage, shifting from light to dark in a beat.

“The play is bold, it’s not a timid little thing,” she says. “It makes tremendous demands on the actors. The situations change so quickly they have to leap like gazelles from one to the next and as a director my job is to hit every different bit of it correctly. It’s like a shoal of fish — it’s constantly moving and constantly changing shape and colour.” 

There’s a lot of “plate-spinning”, she admits. But driving it all, for both sisters, is a deep relish for the playfulness of theatre and the value of comedy in helping us face turbulent times. As Moira Buffini puts it: “Laughter is a great way of exploring the darkness. It doesn’t make it any less serious, the fact that you can laugh.”

‘Manor’, November 16-January 1, nationaltheatre.org.uk