Review by Simon Jenner, February 18th 2025
“The more outlying the island… the stronger the force that pulls us towards it.” Robert, one of two Cambridge scientists might confide this like the cocky young lecturer he is at the start. Much later he concludes differently: “Because time… time belongs to the land. Not to the sea and the air.”
Between those statements his world’s axis shifts. And not his alone. David Greig’s 2002 Outlying Islands was memorably revived at the King’s Head Theatre in January 2019, by Atticist Theatre Company directed by co-founder Jessica Lazar. The same creative team with two additions return with a new cast in this absorbing revival at Jermyn Street till March 15th. The play will not let them go. In its two hour fifteen, it won’t let you go either.
Bruce Langley and Fred Woodley Evans. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
A blustery February now hints how ferocious the weather can be even in June, in the Outer Hebrides. Outlying Islands though bleaches away far more than the traditional props of civilisation, here reduced to one table, in Greig’s scouring exploration of the psyche stripped bare of trappings. It’s like whistling through bones. And never being dry. It’s strange to think this flint-bright play, glinting with possibility, is 23 years old.
Atmosphere in this diminutive space is crucial too. Anna Lewis delivers a simple Bothie set – table, stove, door and warped lintel stage left, sea-fed and torqued; and a space upstage right where mountains crouch in wait for miracles. Daubed like loam, the whole – flecked with wooden items – gleams like silverprint, or the kind being used by these ornithologists. Lewis provides the contrasting holiday-don and islander costumes too, with niece Ellen initially cowled, as highland women were.
David Doyle’s lighting is crucial. It brings facets of bright and dark divided in a northern June sharp as cuttlefish. But there’s a darkroom scene with red light and ounces of stygian gloom, pierced with blue moments of transcendence. When someone stands in the lintel their faces blade with light. The whole experience is of thresholds crossed, boundaries dissolved. Outlying Islands is a magical play threatened with anthrax. And Stan Laurel.
Kevin McMonagle. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Sound by Christopher Preece felicitously draws in bird calls including a chick nesting in a box and its sudden parent; as well as wind howling in storms – scaled from drizzly dreich through plowetery to gale-force hoolan but Greig eschews most dialect. There’s other music too including a Hebridean song at the start and finish, but it’s those natural sounds one treasures. And just once the straying-in of an organ’s high register.
Jennifer Fletcher’s movement direction now augmented by Imogen Frances’ Intimacy direction and Enric Ortuno’s fight direction has to contain boisterous male energy and of course stillness in this space, with a different feel to the King’s Head. There’s less abstract ballet now, and gestural flight; more naturalist movement, hauntingly understated in an erotic moment becoming ritual in a pagan chapel.
Greig’s starting point was a real Robert and John and the latter’s 1995 Island Going written sixty years after the event, dealing with how two Oxford ornithologists mapped the outlying islands. Greig’s moved this ornithological tale on by four years threading it with darker moments as war looms.
Kevin McMonagle’s dreich of a curmudgeon Ian Kirk, and his niece Ellen (Whitney Kehinde) host these two Cambridge researchers: roistering patrician Robert (Bruce Langley) and Fred Woodley Evans’s naïve but empathic Edinburgh-born John (like Greig himself), in their ‘Ministry’ (i.e. government) sponsored ornithological survey. Langley’s and Woodley Evans’s joshing is micro-tuned and startlingly believable throughout. They’re outstanding together. McMonagle’s wary grasping and glowering gives way to the glow of whisky. He’s as authentic-seeming as a face scratched on an old plank.
Bruce Langley and Fred Woodley Evans. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner.. Photo Credit Alex Brenner
Bruce Langley and Kevin McMonagle. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
It’s virgin habitat and Leach’s fork-tailed petrel might finally be photographed. But as Kirk divulges after inventory taking – his manipulation of expenses is a delight – and much more whisky, the Ministry have confided an unpleasant secret: one he intends to capitalise on. It’s not the locals who want to preserve this island, with its annual grazing rights. It’s Robert. Even John prepares to join the RAF. But Robert?
We open with a warped door Kirk orders trusting John to smash open; then charges the Ministry for its repair. The broken door’s recurring joke is wrong-footedly funny. Early bustle – boyish leaping about, Kirk’s dour amusement and condemnation of the old pagan chapel – settle around the quiet watchfulness of Ellen.
Robert’s risk-taking – he almost blasts them with gallons of paraffin poured on a fire, after flattening John under the door – seems part the gambling entitlement of his old now ruined family where a gaming grandfather lost half Hertfordshire. It throbs beneath his brilliant apprehension of everything around him. Langley’s clean-cut compelling take on Alpha-ness leaps on every occasion as an opportunity.
Whilst Robert’s character thus identifies with a rather primal-feudal take on Darwinism, an almost sociopathic disregard for others like Kirk and sexually, Ellen, John’s virginal hesitancies coalesce round quietism. Woodley Evans takes everything soft-grained, with an unexpected toughness. Unwilling to even compete, he proves a friend to Ellen.
It’s Ellen though, in a superbly wry portrayal by Kehinde, who proves she knows exactly what she wants from both men. Indeed Ellen’s refusal to take conventional routes shapes the way this drama progresses to magic realism. Already sinning in her uncle’s eyes in her love of cinema, especially Laurel and Hardy (she’s seen Way Out West 37 times; it takes on an erotic dimension), she decides both men are Laurel too. And this is, as Kirk’s pointed out, a pagan chapel.
Bruce Langley and Fred Woodley Evans. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Bruce Langley and Fred Woodley Evans. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner.
Greig inverts any obvious conflicts. Robert’s extreme rationalism merely thinks it’s rational. Ellen unlike her heathen-hating uncle, knows she’s a pagan and infinitely more lucid than anyone. Kehinde adds a transcendent nimbus to Ellen’s stillness as she extends her hands.
Unabashed by Robert’s photograph of her bathing she commands John to gaze at it. When the trio have occasion to sing “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” it could slow the action: it energises it. A stroke of genius, it’s fuelled such scenes since. I’d gamble David Eldrige’s In Basildon took a tiny leaf from this.
There’s a breathtaking denouement. When McMonagle proves his versatility as a patrician captain the play ends in a flutter of question marks.
Kehinde’s rapt and compelling, comic and vulnerably firm as she takes charge of herself and those around her. Woodley Evans and Langley respond to this with outstanding performances trimmed by balletic delicacy.
A first rate-revival of a small classic, one of the finest works the prolific, protean Greig has produced, and unique in any roster of early 21st century plays. Do seek out this rare, dream-like play crossed with the stink of fish-oil and puffin.
Costume Supervisor Eleni Beaumont Hulme, Casting Director Sarah Jones, Assistant Director Brigitte Adela, Stage Manager Amos Clarke, Movement Director Jennifer Fletcher, Assistant Stage Manager (placement) Natasha Werblow , Photography Alex Brenner
Bruce Langley and Fred Woodley Evans. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner.