The cast of Shipwreck © Marc Brenner

Shipwreck by Annie Washburn – Almeida Theatre, London

Annie Washburn’s new play is intended as a reckoning with Trump. The show pitches itself as a invitation to dinner with the 45th President, but unfortunately would be better described as an evening of meandering chat with a cast of confused New York liberals. The set-up is a snowed upstate weekend attended by three couples: two ultra-wealthy lawyers, two aging hippies and a pair who have just bought a farmhouse, and have only leftover hot dogs  in the freezer. The talk turns immediately to Trump, Jim and Teresa having arrived from helping their daughter give birth, for which she requested a “Trump-free 24 hours|. The setting is 2017, during the revelations that followed Trump’s dismissal of FBI Director James Comey. Stranded around a fire, the couples run through their disbelief, frustration and rage at the state of the country, and secrets begin to emerge. As a parallel plot strand, Mark discusses his adoption as a Kenyan baby by a white NY family, including scenes with his parents, and describes the process of understanding what slavery meant to black people in the US, and what it means to him. Finally, we get dinner with the President, as the talk is interspersed with grand guignol scenes presided over by a demonic, semi-clad Trump.

On the surface, this sounds like a compelling set of ideas, and the basis for an engaging drama, but it does not work out this way. The play is long – 3 hours – which is fine as long as the time taken seems necessary and inherent to the drama. Here it seems indulgent and, while there is plenty of sharp dialogue scattered throughout the evening, it could easily have been half the length without losing anything important. The tension simmers, very gently, below the surface of the campfire conversations, and some scenes are simply boring, especially a dialogue in which Mark reflects on a conversation with his parents about whether he is allowed MTV. It is an earnest attempt to explain the origins of the Trump mindset, but it is not clear why a stage is the place for it. The Almeida’s new, temporary revolve spins the play round on the spot, never reaching a destination.

The second half of the play breaks down into a series of monologues. Marks’s role is almost entirely speeches to the audience and, although well-written and pack an emotional punch, they seem disengaged from the rest of the play. This is not helped by an explanatory, rug-pulling twist which comes in the penultimate line of the evening, which far too late to be reorientating the audience’s perceptions of everything they have heard. The Trump scenes are also dull, which is unforgivable for carnivalesque satire. Shipwreck has a half-American, half-British cast who are uniformly excellent, including Raquel Cassidy as Jools, whose mildness finally lurches into fury, Khalid Abdalla as Yusuf, the lawyer who plays with the dark side, Justine Mitchell as Allie, whose activism is all talk, and Fisayo Akinade as Mark. However, the play is need of a serious edit, and it is frustrating that a well-intentioned attempt to skewer both the politics of populism, and the comfortable liberal assumptions that enabled it, cannot find the focus it needs.

Tom Brooke in Berberian Sound Studio

Berberian Sound Studio by Joel Horwood – Donmar Warehouse, London

Berberian Sound Studio is a stage version of the 2012 film, about a repressed English sound engineer whose documentaries about rutting deer on Box Hill and the South Downs get him a gig in Rome, working on torture scenes in a Italian giallo horror production. Peter Strickland’s film was curious and strange, heavy on atmosphere, light on events and hard to forget. It is easy to see why a film set mainly in a recording studio is so  suited to the stage, and Tom Scutt has created a beautifully balanced and unusual piece of theatre.

The production values are a delight. Tom Scutt, also a designer, has created with Anna Yates a loving tribute to 1970s analogue technology, with a full-sized sound booth dominating the stage, all dark wood, tape reels and chrome switches. The sound team are dubbing a film directed by the legendary director Santini, and they gaze over the heads of the audience towards a supposed projection on the back wall. We never seen any film, but we hear everything and the sound design is a world in itself. Ben and Max Ringham create a pin-sharp soundscape in which the texture of a scream, analysed over and over, becomes compelling and thoroughly disturbing.

The casting of Tom Brooke, whose excellent stage work has often been in supporting roles, as the main character Gilderoy is a fine choice. His inability to cross the gulf between his life in Surrey with his mother and tape machines and the Gothic world of giallo is delivered with excruciating awkwardness. The play switches between moods in a disconcerting fashion from frustration and menace to choreographed comedy. Some of the best moments come when the two foley artists, Massimo and Massimo, perform increasingly elaborate sequences to accompany the film we cannot see – walking in high heels, splashing in buckets, wielding axes and chopping cabbages, all without a word.

As a sequential plot, Berberian Sound Studio doesn’t really go anywhere in particular, and this seems entirely natural, and an attempt in the dying moments to provide explanation and closure seems unneccessary.  The enclosed world of the sound stage filters the outside world, allowing Gilderoy to edit and balance reality to fit the fiction. Hints creep in of what is happening back in Surrey through his mother’s taped messages, in which the fate of a chiff chaff nest implies horror off screen, while the studio becomes a torture chamber of its own. In the end though, the sound of Gilderoy snapping celery seems more terrifying than the breaking bones it seems to represent. Scutt’s production draws the audience into its world, and keeps them there, listening.

Oberon K. A. Adjepong and Ukweli Roach in Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train at the Young Vic. Photo by Johan Persson

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis – Young Vic, London

Published at The Quietus

The hexagonal Young Vic auditorium has been split down the middle, and the stage resembles a cat walk, long and narrow, with the audience on either side. The actors are trapped in the middle, exits blocked by glass security doors that slide up and down on rollers, controlled by unseen hands. Magda Willi’s sparse set leaves no hope of escape, and no hope of avoiding judgement. Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play, ‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’ is a prison drama set (although we discover this only at the very end) in New York’s Riker’s Island Prison. It revolves around two central characters incarcerated in the jail: Lucius a serial killer awaiting extradition to Florida for execution; and Angel, who “shot the Reverend Kim in the ass” but did not expect him to die. A third character, a conflicted, morally opaque lawyer (Dervla Kirwan) represents Angel and pivots through his parts of the story.

Guirgis’ play was a hit when first performed in the USA in the early 2000s, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s production came to London in 2003. Kate Hewitt’s revival for the Young Vic is a chance to see how well its stark, demonstrative look into the darkness of guilt and redemption has lasted, and whether it is the modern classic some suggested at the time. Unfortunately, the new production reveals a conceptually disjointed piece of writing, big on effects and lacking in coherence. Its most obvious drawback is a lack of dramatic drive which, in play that covers child murder, prison rape, cults, God, guilt, lies and the American justice system, is a strange failing. All the main characters have set piece speeches in which they confront their demons, and the play revolves around these, but they are all soliloquies. It soon becomes apparent that the play fits onto such an unusually shaped stage because there is almost no need for scenes involving more than two characters, and much of the time only one actor is performing. The play is essentially a set of monologues stitched together at the edges, and showing signs of fraying. 

This structural failing reflects the lack of a coherent relationship between the three stories that form the play. Lucius has done terrible things but now he has found God. He shares an isolation wing with Angel, placed there for protection after he was attacked and raped while on remand. A sadistic guard runs the wing, making life unpleasant for both of them. Angel debates guilt and faith with Lucius, but his concerns are entirely different. He shot the Reverend Kim character who ‘stole’ his friend by persuading him to join a ‘son of God’ cult, and is now in way over his head. His lawyer, who talks mostly to the audience, presents herself as reasonable, measured and in charge, but her ego will evidently lead to her client going to jail. She teaches him to lie to protect himself, but it is not apparent whether this is a good thing or not, and it does not work. These characters seem to belong to different plays, and Kirwan’s character has no contact at all with Lucius. Guirgis skips around topics while we wait to find out where he plans to focus.

It seems ‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’ is a play about perceptions of guilt. Can someone, such as Lucius, who has done the worst things imaginable, be condemned as a murderer in the same way as accidental killer Angel? Is the refusal to consider Lucius’ brutal upbringing based on race? And can religious faith change someone, even someone with a past like Lucius? An examination of the psyche of the most depraved serial killer could be fascinating, but we never get this. Instead, the Lucius presented on stage spends his time arguing about religion, which turns him into just another born again Christian with little new to offer. US actor Oberon KA Adjepong, as Lucius, has the star part and plays it to the hilt, but Guirgis offers him set pieces rather than character development.

Guirgis’ writing has a curious tone, often more black comedy than realism. This is perhaps not surprising from the man behind ‘Synecdoche New York’, but it sows confusion over how seriously we are meant to take the play’s themes. The slapstick-with-guns story shooting of the Rev. Kim could be plucked straight from Chester Himes’ brutally funny Harlem crime novels. It sits oddly alongside the straight confessional story of a lawyer’s struggles, delivered by Kirwan. The latter works hard, but finds little coherence in a part that fails to integrate with the main thrust of the play. Meanwhile, Ukweli Roach as Angel convincingly communicates the character’s emotional desolation, hidden behind a truculent exterior. However, Angel’s journey from new inmate to desperate lifer is occurs largely through off-stage events rather than through action and dialogue.

There is a powerful play about the US justice system hidden in here, waiting to get out. Angel’s fate is not related to what he has done, or to justice at all, but depends on plea bargaining, competing egos and placating the DA. There are moments when the play discusses the racial prejudice underlying supposed justice, and comes to life. These modern scandals are even more relevant fifteen years on, and have been recently been documented much better by the ‘This American Life’ podcast. There are glimpses of energy in these aspects of the play, but they are thrown away. Instead, Guirgis provides a disconnected roam across semi-connected individuals, book-ended with the underdeveloped warden characters, that leaves us none the wiser about the big issues he appears to tackle. There is plenty of noise and fury on offer, but a real lack of clarity over what ‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’ is really about. 

Pia Tjelta & Adrian Rawlins

The Lady From the Sea by Henrik Ibsen – Print Room at the Coronet, London

The Norwegian Ibsen Company has struck up a relationship with the Print Room, presenting their second show following last year’s Little Eyolf at the gorgeous Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill. The company sounds long-established but, in fact, was set up recently to fill a Royal Shakespeare Company-shaped gap in Norwegian culture. There is no arguing with more Ibsen on our stages: his plays combine dark folklore and poetry with a questioning of basic social assumptions that remains nagglingly current a century later. The Lady from the Sea, rarely performed in the UK,  is a fascinating and alluring play, but this production provides an uneven account.

We are used to European companies with distinctive styles, but The Lady From the Sea lacks a defining directorial grip. The main characteristic of Marit Moum Aune’s bi-lingual production, which features an Anglo-Norwegian version of the central family, is awkwardness. Wangel doesn’t know why his wife won’t sleep with him; Arnholm thinks his old pupil carries a torch; Bolette finds her old teacher’s attentions excruciating; Lyngstrand won’t admit he’s dying; and Hilde thinks her step-mother doesn’t love her. Meanwhile, Ellida is on pills and haunted by the call of the sea, and a darkly mythic secret. It’s a masterful picture of thwarted ambition tied up by unequal relationships, but the production – set on a beach overlooking the fjord where tourist ships come and go , leaving the inhabitants stranded – has an uneven cast, who lack the strong ensemble dynamic essential to the flow of the play.

The best performances come from Pia Tjelta as Ellida, Adrian Rawlins as Wangel, her struggling husband, and company founder Kåre Conradi (looking, coincidentally, very like his RSC counterpart, Greg Doran) as the increasingly manipulative figure of Arnholm.  Tjelta’s performance is alive and real rather than otherwordly, so her inability to resist the baleful influence of a mysterious seaman is a real shock. When she slips into subtitled Norwegian, which she does when talking of the sea, the production really catches light as an energy courses through her.  Rawlins plays Wangel, her long-suffering but controlling husband, as dishevelled, good hearted, and wrestling with himself, his demons and her impossible longing to return to the unattainable sea, other world of a life with The Stranger. Conradi is benign and white-suited, a middle aged man who gradually realises he has the power he needs over Bolette to get what he wants, and force her into marriage.

The Lady From the Sea confronts the need for liberation and mutual respect within marriage, the only way to achieve true freedom. Wangel makes a supreme effort to let Ellida go, and finds he has won her back by doing so. It is therefore ironic that his young daughter Bolette should meanwhile be compromising her own freedom, believing she can is escaping the constraints of her life while imprisoning herself in a union she does not want. The production suggests that, as she pulls away from Arnholm at the very end, she may realise her mistake, but it is very like Ibsen to avoid a clear-cut resolution. If men can accept the equal agency of women perhaps we can all liberate ourselves, but the desire for the impossible will always be there, the belief that a different and better version of our lives calling to us from somewhere out to sea.

A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter – Pinter Theatre, London

The culmination of Jamie Lloyd’s Pinter at the Pinter season, which has been a triumph, is two short plays from very early in Harold Pinter’s career both of which he directs. Not has only the production of all Pinter’s short plays provide that there is a large, enthusiastic audience for apparently difficult and oblique drama; it has also made the case that Pinter’s short drama, comparatively overlooked, should be judged on a level with his full-length plays. They include some of his best writing.

The final pairing brings together The Dumb Waiter, his third play, and his fourth, A Slight Ache, written for radio. The combination is clever, as the former is an acknowledged classic while the latter, despite a 2008 National Theatre production, is less well known. It opens the bill, in a production which ingeniously builds on its radio origins. A cut-glass couple, Edward (John Heffernan) and Flora (Gemma Whelan) are increasingly troubled by a figure standing in the lane outside their perfect, suburban house, apparently selling matches to no-one. The Matchseller, like an Ibsen character – the Button-Moulder in Peer Gynt or the Rat Wife in Little Eyolf – can only be a harbinger of death, but in Pinter’s hands the tension builds beautifully through the language of status. Edward attempts to cow the silent Matchseller with increasingly florid attempts at rank pulling and one-upmanship, including a delightful stream of elaborate drink options, delivered with an aggressively entirely out of keeping with the subject matter. Meanwhile, Flora is keen to diffuse her husband’s fixation on the grim-smelling figure, while sexually attracted to him, incorporating him into a fantasy in which he is kept as a pet. The play is deliciously dark and beautifully played. Whelan’s froideur falls apart deliciously as her life is disrupted and undermined, while Heffernan’s sense of mild disbelief at his own words channels Simon Russell Beale in the same part. Lloyd sets the play in a radio studio, with the actors recording their parts, but the increasing psychological temperature invades the recording booth, all the more effectively since we cannot see The Matchseller they are addressing, and he seems to exist only in their minds.

The Dumb Waiter is a simpler play, but devastatingly effective. It has a star cast pairing Martin Freeman and Danny Dyer as the two hitmen, waiting for instructions in the basement of a Birmingham restaurant. The casting is by no means for effect: both are absolutely right for their roles. Freeman plays Gus, the junior, nervier partner who asks a lot of questions. Dyer plays Ben, in charge but not necessarily in control. The play is a masterclass in the banality of evil, the carefully honed talk of ‘The Villa’ and ‘The Spurs’ mixing with moments of utter horror (“What a mess! They don’t hold together so well do they, women.”) Dyer plays the wannabe gangster to great effect. He has the aggression, all the poses, the neck-twitching muscularity, and his every move reveals that he is not convincing himself. Freeman is full of friendly chatter, rising panic and reasonable concerns, the kind you should definitely not be raising if you are a hitman. There are moments of genuine comedy, as the dumb waiter spits out increasingly impractical food order, and the cast tread a delicate line between tension, absurdity and the ordinary as everyone, on stage and off, gropes their way forward in the dark.

Photo by Stephen Cummiskey

When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other by Martin Crimp – National Theatre (Dorfman), London

The publicity for Martin Crimp’s new play, gleefully stoked by the National Theatre, has been all about Cate Blanchett and ‘bondage’ scenes. With the chance to even book available only to winners of a ballot, it is not clear why the theatre felt it needed to brief the press about fainting audience members. This approach, and the surrounding tumescent excitement, reminiscent of the male critic-drive fuss around Nicole Kidman’s appearance in Blue Room in the 1990s, sells the performers short. It also builds expectations to unsustainable levels for what is an intriguing, but strangely disconnected and piece.

Katie Mitchell’s staging takes places in a garage, stunningly realised by Vicki Mortimer: not an elegant garage, but an entirely ordinary breeze-block and fibreboard carport, with an interior door leading to somewhere we never see. There’s an Audi parked up on stage, the setting for a number of scenes. The main performers are Blanchett and Stephen Dillane, performing twelve episodes in the coercive/consensual relationship between the unnamed pair. Nominally based on Samuel Richardson’s 18th century novel Pamela – in which a squire attempts to rape his teenage maid and eventually ‘rewards her virtue’ by marrying her – Crimp’s play seems intended to test the boundaries of what can and can’t be said and done between a man and a woman. It is all about roles, as the pair act out their relationship in front of an onstage audience – modern-day servants, who get involved in the action. They also frequently swap roles, with Blanchett playing the man and Dillane the woman. Meanwhile, the entire scenario is a performance of an unspecified kind – the garage setting is never referred to or explained.

Crimp writes in a manner rarely seen on the 21st century British stage, his formal, stylised scenes more reminiscent of Howard Barker or Edward Bond than the realism that dominates contemporary drama. While his style can often be refreshing and exciting, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured One Another falls short of his best work. Despite excellent performances from the two fine leads and the supporting cast, especially Jessica Gunning as the unexpectedly sexually confident housekeeper, it is hard to take the play seriously. The relationship between Blanchett and Dillane seems strangely old-fashioned, much more like a parody of 1970s gender roles than anything that relates to a recognisable present. A sub-strand, in which Blanchett gets what she wants from the handyman and bit-of-rough, plays like a Lady Chatterley spoof. It would  be a mistake to take the play entirely seriously in any case, and it is at its best when sliding into absurdist humour. The climactic (in both senses) scenes, involving a series of vigorous sex acts, including Cate Blanchett in an dildo from an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, are hilarious, taking on an around the Audi while the cast simultaneously delivers formal, explanatory speeches about their roles. But, although the comedy is beautifully delivered, Crimp’s testing of the boundaries, and exploration of what we would do if we were free from the constraints of gender-based expectation, has little to offer beyond the entertainment of seeing skilled performers at the top of their games.

Kompromat by David Thame – Vault Festival, London

David Thame’s two-man show, which premieres at the Vault Festival, presents a naggingly familiar scenario. A young, brilliant, naive mathematician lives alone in a London flat, looking for sex and company in gay clubs. But he has just moved from Cheltenham, an instant giveaway that he is a secret services cryptographer at GCHQ, transferred to MI6 and a target for anyone who wants to know about his work. When he takes a gorgeous young man – a ‘9’ – back to his flat, and tells him about his work in quantum computing he is already doomed.

Kompromat is a fictionalised version of the spy-in-a-bag story, the unexplained death of an M16 cryptographer found dead in a North Face bag in his Pimlico flat in 2010. The key feature of the case is that, despite the bizarre, highly publicised, circumstances no-one actually knows what happens, except presumably those who will never tell. Thame fills the huge gap at the heart of the story by telling it from the perspective of Zac (Max Rinehart), the club pick-up responsible for the death of Tom (Guy Warren-Thomas), the Williams character now lying dead on his sofa. With powerful economy, Thame spins a backstory of a shady network of Hungarian operatives, led by Zac’s ‘daddy’ Janos who keeps in a Budapest mansion, gives him presents for sex and keeps him on hand to deal with problems, such as Williams. The latter is up from the country, insecure, foolish and easy prey for smooth, ruthless operators linked, somewhat vaguely, to Russians and oligarchs.

The play is well-structured, with scenes recounting the evening leading to Tom’s death interspersed with reflection from Zac on his sinister situation and occupation. The story is engaging told, and characters are strong. However, the play is also problematic, a fiction that theorises  the tragic death of a young man whose family have never received a credible explanation. Without a detailed knowledge of the case, which is a web of misinformation, it is hard to know whether Kompromat sheds light on what happened, or simply redeploys elements of the story for dramatic effect. Certainly some aspects – the central role played by Hungarians, for example – beg more questions that they answer. The use of quantum computing – Tom’s speciality – as an human relationship metaphor – also lacks originality and seems tenuous. Thame has created a neat drama, but its explicit relationship to such a complex story, with real consequences for people who are very much alive, leaves a lingering sense that this speculative play allows the writer both to have his cake and to eat it.

Image copyright Johan Persson

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare – National Theatre (Olivier), London

Antony and Cleopatra is a tough play to stage. It demands a great deal of the audience, often keeping them at arm’s length from the frequently frustrating main characters, and with a strange change of pace from a decade-leaping first half to a minute-by-minute second half. It succeeds or fails with its leads. Cleopatra is the biggest woman’s role in Shakespeare and Mark Antony has more lines than King Lear, Macbeth, Henry V or Richard II. Fortunately, the National Theatre’s production has cast the leads to perfection, and it is hard to imagine a better account of this strange play.

Ralph Fiennes could have been born to play Antony. His general is an aging hipster, used to gliding through life on his charm. When we meet him, he is just too old to get away with that any more, although he is still wearing the open shirts and ludicrous trousers. The exquisitely awkward capers and weird dramatic handshakes that form part of his public performance diminish him, and it is clear he is doomed from the start, although he has no idea. His self-regard, and emotional manipulation of those around him means he is simply unable to see reality outside of himself. In this he is matched only by Cleopatra, who he deserves as she deserves him. Emotional manipulation is her only weapon, but in Sophie Okonedo’s performance her charm, undeniable and hard to resist, but she has a child-like, damaged aspect too. Alone in her palace with no-one but Iras and Charmian, Okonedo seems even less moored to reality than Antony. Her final gesture, pretending to be dead, is an appalling thing to do and only Antony would see it in any other way. The two are consummate performers, but their only audience is themselves and one another.

Antony and Cleopatra is a play about the gap between the legend and the reality. Fiennes and Okonedo give triumphant peformances, utterly convincing as people who believe their own press. The only hope for them is to launch their immortality through death. The grim sequence of events as Antony tries to outsource his suicide, then botches it, and then spends his final moments being hauled up on an Ancient Egyptian winch, are painful and absurd to watch. Cleopatra, alone with her handmaids, makes a better end – with an excellent snake – surely it can’t be real? It is real! –  but the production highlights the futility of their deaths, as Caesar instantly repackages events, standing over their bodies as he uses them to secure himself in power.

Simon Godwin’s production makes excellent use of the Olivier’s expanses, the perfect theatre for this epic. Hildegard Bechtler’s sets are stunning, with hotel Deco opulence, an on-stage pool and a submarine (Pompey’s galley) that rises monumentally from the revolve. The cast is something of a National Theatre classic line-up. Tim McMullan, singled out by Nicholas Hytner in his memoirs as the fulcrum for his time at the NT, is a highly likeable Enobarbus. Katy Stephens is, as always, excellent as the gender-swapped Agrippa, a clever move from the director that opens up hints of a relationship with Enobarbus. Tunji Kasim is both calculating and involved as Caesar, while Nicholas Le Prevost is an ideal stumbling Lepidus. The production, opulent and uncompromising, is the sort of showcase the National Theatre produces better than any other theatre.

Image courtesy Timothy Kelly

Outlying Islands by David Grieg – King’s Head Theatre, London

The revival of David Grieg’s 2002 play, Outlying Islands, at the King’s Head Theatre reintroduces a play of wonderful, haunting poetry and complexity, a flawed but brilliant piece of writing. Set in 1939, it features two ornithologists ‘from the Ministry’ arriving on a remote, abandoned Scottish islands to survey the bird population. Robert is confident, charming and somewhat pathological in his obsession with scientific observation, of humans as well as birds. John is Scottish, nervous and hidebound. They are rowed over the island’s owner, Kirk, a grey-bearded Presbyterian with a hatred of sin and cinemas and his niece Ellen, who at first seems shyer than all of them. This is a fictionalised Gruinard, the Western Isle contaminated with anthrax during World War Two experiments, and left uninhabitable for fifty years, and the scientists are there to survey the birds which are soon to be wiped out, along with all other signs of life.

Most writers would stick to that story, but Grieg is a subtle an unpredictable playwright. Over the course of a full length play, he spins out unexpected events, family drama and relationship tension among the four, living alone in wild conditions. Back on shore the world is gearing up for war, but the island sits apart. The play is set in ‘the chapel’, a single room hut with nothing but a stove, broken door and a table, the only piece of furniture on the island – recreated with conviction by designer Anna Lewis. But Kirk says it is a pagan place, and its people are best gone. Far from civilisation, the four remain until the boat returns for them in a month’s time. Perhaps they have a chance to live more like the birds Robert and John photograph everyday, who let the wind take them. But they are recording what lives on the island precisely so it can be destroyed.

Jessica Lazar’s production is an excellent, enthralling account of a fascinating play. The intensity of the four performers shines through on the King’s Head’s tiny stage. Ken Drury as Kirk is both bullying and comic, darkly describing Edinburgh as a place of “random defecation”. Jack McMillan as John is a mass of inhibitions, which makes his final attempts to open up particularly moving. Tom Machell is mercurial and idealistic as Robert, wordly but unable to square the contradictions between the natural and human codes of being. And Rose Wardlaw as Ellen gives the most surprising performance of all, physically unfurling as she frees herself from the burdens of social and sexual expectations. Grieg gives her two remarkable speeches, one in which she describes spying on one of the men, masturbating on the cliffs, and another in which she recounts the legend of the island’s creation by a giantess, scattering sheep droppings from her apron pockets as the Western Isles form.

Outlying Islands is difficult to classify, containing elements of political thriller, an Ealing comedy, folk horror, a coming of age story, a war story, a documentary about the limits of human existence, and a utopian island experiment. This is its strength, and Grieg’s confidence as a writer shines through. The play reminds us of other genres but is simply itself. The King’s Head should be congratulated for a powerful, engrossing production of a modern classic that lodges itself in the mind, sending us into the Islington night to dream of a world where we could take wing.