SCOTTISH playwright David Greig set his 2002 play Outlying Islands on the furthest outlier rock from the Outer Hebrides in 1939, a time when Great Britain was holding its breath for another war and just nine years after 18-year-old Mary Anne MacLeod emigrated from Lewis to America … later to give birth to Donald Trump.
That’s not really relevant to the play being performed at Salisbury’s Studio Theatre, but perhaps it’s not too fanciful to believe that Ellen Kirk, the pivotal figure of Outlying Islands, had the same lust for life and anger at the restrictions of her community and upbringing.
The play was a hit in Scotland, and had a couple of English outings, one of which brought it to Salisbury’s Salberg Studio in 2004, where it starred the drama student Sam Heughan as the tender young John. Sam later became Jamie Fraser, international star of Outlander. It had another production in Atlanta, Georgia, when Grieg’s plays were showcased, and there it was seen by Joanna Daniel, a stalwart of Studio Theatre in Salisbury. Immediately, she vowed to bring it to the stage, and now local audiences have another chance to see this complex, thought-provoking and fascinating drama.
A solid-looking semi-submerged blackhouse set has been cleverly envisaged by designers Jemma and Octavia Hill, taking the audience into the abandoned “pagan” chapel, but bringing in the rugged cliffs and endless skies. And all the time the cries of the seabirds, especially those of Leach’s Storm Petrel with its forked tail, swirl around.
The story starts as two young graduate ornithologists, the confident English Robert and the reticent and serious Scottish John, arrive on the island with its “owner”, the cantankerous and money-obsessed Kirk and his niece Ellen, to spend four weeks surveying the bird colonies for “The Ministry.”
Each has very different expectations of the 28 days they will spend together on this isolated rock, with only the seabirds for company.
Within hours of arrival, the ebullient and entitled Robert sets out his own collection strategies, both for the birds and the women, at the same time as rhapsodising the migrations of the never-before-studied fork-tailed bird, and determining to save the island.
Kirk counts the cost of every element of the survey, ready to charge The Ministry in full, and very willing to sell the island over which he has grazing rights for the rumoured anthrax experiment (which originated at Porton Down outside Salisbury), as long as the price is right.
John wants to make a serious count of the birds, while accepting the island’s suitability for the experiment, but is distracted by the presence of Ellen. Her obsession is the cinema, and the object of her affection is Stan Laurel (no, really).
The production brilliantly captures the claustrophobia and isolation, and the building tensions aggravated by too much whisky and too little food or sleep. The director is working with a largely new cast, and both the writing and the subject matter are extremely demanding, so it is particularly impressive that Sophie Cuerden, Jack Cunningham, Michael Harvey and John Jenner create an intense, sometimes menacing, sometimes comical atmosphere that continues to involve and surprise the audience.
In an intimate theatre space, with your friends and family close by, it is quite a feat to build the poignant intensity that Sophie and Jack achieved, and the numb puzzlement of Michael.
It is not an easy play, but brilliantly produced and interpreted by the Studio Theatre team, and on until Saturday.
GP-W
Photographs by Trinity Photography