10 – 14 May

Back in the nineties there was a vogue for sending middle management out on away days to ‘build character’, or engender team spirit. Or was it really more a case of ‘let’s see who’s prepared to do anything to keep their job’? I have personally witnessed a grown man donning an oversized nappy and have heard of employees being asked to walk across hot coals in order to prove their credentials. Then people started working 50 and 60-hour weeks. Oh, the fun we had! It’s that sense of corporate absurdity that writer Tim Firth (Calendar Girls, Our House, Kinky Boots) tapped into originally with Neville’s Island in 1992, but which is now re-imagined as Sheila’s Island, with an all-female cast.

Described as The Office meets Lord of The Flies meets Miranda, Sheila’s Island follows the desperate antics of marketing manager Sheila and her team of three – Denise, Julia and Fay – on a team-building challenge that goes horribly wrong. They mistakenly wash up on a small island in the Lake District with one mobile phone that’s rapidly losing power, no food and a growing sense that their catastrophic mistake will go down badly with their line managers. And just maybe there’s a wild man on the island.

Sheila (Judy Flynn), is brimming with pride. Her cryptic crossword-solving skills have bested the other teams – haven’t they? Surely the next clue must be on this island, somewhere? But as day turns to evening and night, Captain Sheila and her team begin to realise that it is a crisis they are having to solve, not more clues. As hunger and the cold begin to seep into their psyche, so the lid comes off the emotional lives bubbling under, and this on a difficult stage to negotiate – Liz Cooke’s design of craggy constructed rock with its backdrop of windswept trees meant the actors always had to watch their step.

Understudy Tracy Collier took the role of Denise in place of Abigail Thaw tonight. Denise has many of the play’s best lines – responding to the perceived shortcomings of the others with sarcastic wit and, at times, merciless criticism. Collier delivered a terrific performance which merited the applause she got from her fellow players at the final curtain. Exploiting the fault-lines between job security and career resentment, her rage seemed authentic.

In-your-face Julie (Rina Fatania), is a no-nonsense human resources manager with a bottomless rucksack full of in-case-you-might-need-it camping gear, including an 18-inch knife. But it is the character of Fay, a devoted bird-watcher and Christian, dreamily played by Sara Crowe, who springs the biggest surprise of the night. Her history of mental fragility sets her up as the least able in the group, but there will be dramatic re-assessment later.

Firth’s writing hasn’t aged badly and there are funny moments – “It’s survival of the hottest” says menopausal Denise at one point. But Fay’s transformative moment aside, there was always the sense that we were laughing at the characters, rather than with them, and that these were erring towards being more cardboard cut-out rather than being, more probably, reasonably savvy women caught up in a nonsense.

★★★☆☆   Simon Bishop 11th May

Photo credit: Craig Fuller