WILD SHORES IN WARTIME
Risk taking a gap between seeing David Greig plays and you forget how downright louche things are likely to turn out. (I had lately revelled in Prudencia Hart and in Midsummer, the one with the talkimg willie) . Expect lyricism in sudden monologue, streaks of myth and pagan weirdness, someone dead or magic, and probably some kind of erotic cataclysm. In this case, a wrenching three-handed interlude in a semi-derelict pagan Hebridean rock chapel by the glimmer of a darkroom lantern, with one participant frenziedly envisaging a third party as a seagull (Intimacy Director credited, but nothing to frighten the horses). Oh, and be braced for the most unlikely death-watch too.
The setting – achieved with moody beauty in the tiny stage by Anna Lewis’ design- is a tiny island of the outer Hebrides, in 1939. Sound and setting evoke it beautifully (can confirm, I have been to St Kilda). Dour old Kirk is its leaseholder-landlord , a magnificent Kevin McMonagle who sets fire to every scene he’s in. Downtrodden Ellen (Whitney Kehinde) is his resident niece; he is, rather against her inclination, keeping her pure and decent for some suitable fisherman, in layers of forbidding shawls and skirts. Ellen’s real passion is for the cinema on the wicked mainland (or possibly sinful Stornoway) where she has managed to see Laurel and Hardy in Way Out West 37 times . And conceived an erotic passion for Stan Laurel, despite the bowler hat. This obsession she eventually locks into the naked form of young Robert swimming off the rocks. For into their rundown idyll of rock, storm and waves Robert has arrived, an arrogantly preoccupied Cantab naturalist sent to survey the wildlife by the Ministry, accompanied by his assistant John, a gentler and more conventionally moral chap.
There are gloriously lyrical passages about the wild birds, the tiny curlews flying to sea for days, the rackety gannetry where fulmars spit oil, the great wheeling squabbling crowds flying through the storm by night (the inspiration was Robert Atkinson’s famous book ISLAND GOING, about such a rock island). They are marooned there, surveying, until the boat comes back at the end of summer. But on the very first night old Kirk lets drop the reason for the survey: like Gruinard in historic fact, the island is scheduled to be poisoned wholesale in a drop of anthrax: an experimental British bio-weapon (never in the end used in war, but which closed down Gruinard for decades). Kirk is venal, and just needs to calculate how much compensation he’ll be owed for dead sheep and fowling-rights (he shoots puffin and the rest). The young men are horrified; it leads to a violent row and disaster.
Sometimes it carries you along, strong in atmosphere and setting, and Bruce Langley is a suitably unnerving Robert. One suspects it was our modern feeling for wild nature that inspired this revival of a 2002 play, but after a while what Robert represents is actually the least likeable face of naturalism: every living thing as an object , Darwinian glee at nature’s ruthlessness, human feelings nowhere. His zoological remarks about Ellen are pretty chilly , and his attitude both to starving curlew chicks and a human corpse ice-cold. Notably against Fred Woodley Evans as the warmer-hearted, shyer John (a professional debut, and a good one). So the lads do make an interesting contrast .
Kehinde’s Ellen is at first a puzzle, shy and rustic (though without any Hebridean accent), and she is then given an erotically visionary speech about watching Robert swim and pleasure himself naked on the rocks which is – sorry Mr Greig – toe-curlingly expressive of a certain male idea of how young girls think. Later she comes to proper life, taking command, speaking the island myths, calling up the wildness in John because Robert roused it in her. Sexual fireworks match the savage sounds of storm outside, with some fine lines and much ripping off of oilskins. And just as you’re thinking hey, this is all a bit Lord of the Flies, a final moment echoes that almost precisely.
It won an Olivier two decades ago, and was in many ways ahead of its time in its melodramatic surrealism. Jessica Lazard directs at a good pace (though it would work better cut down to a solid 90 minutes, because the interval drops the temperature that bit too far. It’s a curiosity, better done than it really deserves.
Rating 3
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