★★★★✰
Sacrifice is at the heart of Jennifer Tang’s laudable revival of Zinnie Harris’ harrowing tale of island life and loss. It is fitting for a production that comes right in the middle of timely arguments about what it means to settle in ‘H’england’, as the ever determined and compassionate Mill (Jenna Russell) terms it in a strangely familiar dialect that takes the ear a while to get used to. It is rare to be presented with such facets of ‘otherness’ in a world otherwise teeming with information on far flung places, but the depiction of island life, simple, essential and brutal, brings us directly into conflict with our own everyday conveniences.
Forced to flee the only place she has known to be home, due to the sudden eruption of a volcano, for the brightly lit ever whirring modern world that is 1960s England, Mill bemoans the disappointment modernity brings; music can be put on with a flick of a switch and the subtle violence of assimilation is experienced as the grief of one’s homeland. It is easy to see why this production sits so well in the Young Vic’s current season.
The production conjures the thought of displaced communities the world over by climate crisis as Mill and Rebecca, played by a fiercely pained Kirsty Rider, concoct a plan to see for themselves what has become of their island. Based on the real island of Tristan de Cunha in the South Atlantic, the reality of islands submerged by acts of nature outside the world of the play is no fiction. Bill, devastatingly portrayed by a loveable Cyril Nri, Mill and Rebecca soon discover the truth is slippery via the machinations of Mr Hansen (Gerald Kyd) and imperialist expansion is about the furthest thing from their lived experience of preserving each and every resource.
The values of the central islanders have seeped into every level of this production: nothing is wasted, all is spared that can be. Consideration for the materials used, for the origin of those materials and purpose of them can even be found in the seats we sit on. Community is ever present in Soutra Gilmour’s circular set, with the cast surrounded on all sides by audience members seated on tiered textile mixtures of foam and wood.
The pace, like that of island life, feels prolonged and leisurely, at times too much so. Scenes drag into each other, we feel the weight, the effort of dragging the story along. This is occasionally cut by Prema Mehta’s lighting and Ian William Galloway’s illustrative, watery video design that seeps out across the stage, taking us elementally in and out of internal and external worlds. Tragedy, much hinted at, finally arrives like a long awaited boat spotted across the horizon. When it does, an almost primordial horror awakens what would otherwise have been a sleepy, if brilliantly executed, production.
The performances keep the story alert and alive, even if it feels a little lacking in dynamism. The young, unpredictable romance between Francis (Archie Madekwe) and Rebecca is a foil for the lasting intertwining of Bill and Mill and by the final act, we feel cemented enough in the desire for comfort, for happiness, that the loss of any real consolation for these characters is felt. Darkness, however, stays at the edges here and we are constantly waiting, perhaps urging, it to pull us under.
Words by Jordana Belaiche
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