OUTLYING ISLANDS: till 28 June

Tour

OUTLYING ISLANDS
by David Greig

Traverse Theatre on tour to 28 June 2003
Runs 2hr 45min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 May at the Traverse, Edinburgh

Macabre drama with comic touches exploring lives at the edge.
Two young men from the Ministry arrive to number the birdlife on Scotland's remotest island. Their host, Kirk, owns the place, which nests apart has little habitation but an unheated bothie and the one-room chapel an old pagan place where most of the action is set.

Kirk's a wily old bird himself, counting the compensation due from government; his niece Ellen inhabits a world that includes the island originating in a giantess throwing pebbles and the modern totems of Laurel and Hardy, whose signature song she incorporates into an improvised funeral service.

This is 1939, and the Ministry has bio-warfare designs upon the island. But the island strikes back; remote from anyone else for their month's stay, the visitors go native and pagan, inner obsessions driving through public-school surfaces.

This leads to Postman Always Rings Twice-type table-top sex for the ultra-repressed John, while the sexually more frank Robert grows in prefect-type arrogance, defending birdlife by destroying human and eventually himself in an uncontrolled swoop of self-belief or self-doubt after finding his protegee so far ahead with Ellen.

Greig expresses the tug of extremity explored in island narratives, notably Lord of the Flies, creating believable tension between his young men, and comic puritan acquisitiveness in the old island owner. Ellen's the least explored character; though she's given a substantial midpoint soliloquy, it seems an attempt to deepen a character who is more quirks and a tool for developing the young male personalities.

Philip Howard's direction unfortunately allows Lesley Hart a calculatedly hurried delivery in her big speech. Elsewhere, her strangeness' seems imposed back to the writing. Generally, Howard controls the action with care, though exterior scenes, played around and above the central area, cast some awkward shadows across the rear cloudscape of Fiona Watt's all-ways atmospheric set, with its combined elements of claustrophobia, a place out of joint (an ill-fitting door) and wildness.

At the centre are the visitors. Laurence Mitchell's leader of this little pack has a limited vocal range, lacking any sense of command. But Sam Heughan's John admirably conveys the sense of a sheltered existence encountering extremely unsheltered experience.

Robert: Laurence Mitchell
John: Sam Heughan
Kirk/Captain: Robert Carr
Ellen: Lesley Hart

Director: Philip Howard
Designer: Fiona Watt
Lighting: Chahine Yavroyan
Composer: Gavin Marwick

2003-05-12 19:29:16