Byre Theatre, StAndrews, and on tour until 25 March 2006

arol Ann Crawford and Matthew Zajac as Mill and Mr Hansen (pic - Marc Marnie for Prime Productions 2006).

WHEN ZINNIE HARRIS’S play set on an island not unlike the evacuated Atlantic outpost of Tristan da Cahuna opened at the National Theatre (the South Bank version) in 2000, it exposed an urban, metropolitan audience to a mysterious barren landscape.

The unspoken minutiae of such geography already, one suspects, had a voyeuristic allure similar to how kitchen-sink drama was gawped at by those in search of secondhand anthropological kicks.

It did, however, put paid to the patronising vanity held by many of this country’s box-ticking purveyors of all things dramatic that rural-set plays are only of interest to rural audiences.

David Harrower’s ‘Knives In Hens’ set the tone a decade ago, and though they’re worlds apart, you can still recognise that play’s influence on Harris as she tells a tale of an insular community fractured both by internal emotional shifts and external pressures, as well as the more seismic shifts of natural disaster.

It’s 1961, and prodigal Francis returns from the mainland with Hansen, a Cape Town businessman intent on building a fish processing factory. Francis may have had a glimpse of the big bad world, but the umbilical pull of the island’ s quaintly dysfunctional and utterly guileless old ways – as personified by his aunt and uncle, Mill and Bill – are greater. Especially with his abandoned ex-girlfriend Rebecca about to give birth.

Once a long dormant volcano bursts into life, however, the displacement of being shipped off to a more ordered world causes long-harboured secrets to erupt in a similar fashion.

Harris’s symbolism is plain, and the pared down knowingness of her dialogue is wracked with the islanders pain as they deal with their lot. Her juxtapositions between the progressive and the primal, alongside her observations of the inhumane roots of encroaching globalisation, sit curiously prescient in such increasingly homogenised times.

It’s all a tad overwrought in Benjamin Twist’s production for Prime Productions, however. Part of the problems are in the design, which appears awkwardly at odds with the text, enough to demean its weight, and leave many of the cast without an anchor to ground them.

Rising above it, however, as indeed does her character Mill, is a heroic Carol Ann Crawford, who’s heartrending turn avoids shrillness enough to recall what might have happened to Arnold Wesker’ s Beattie Bryant in his defining work, ‘Roots’, if that particular heroine had stayed so defiantly untutored.

© Neil Cooper, 2006

Further Than The Furthest Thing is now touring Scotland, including dates in the Highlands and Islands – full tour details can be found at Prime productions website:

http://www.primeproductions.co.uk/tour_schedule_furthest_thing.shtml