Zinnie Harris's award-wining play ensnared imaginations at last year's Edinburgh Festival and most recently at the National Theatre, portraying a placid island community dealing with the explosion of a volcano, capitalist corruption, and Cold War politics in its midst.
It starts by seducing audience members with the simple charms and language of a life where penguin eggs are a delicacy, and then shows unsentimentally how the magic is dispelled after the volcano erupts and the islanders are evacuated to Southampton.
Paola Dionisotti has rightly been hailed for her luminous performance as Mill, an island inhabitant whose ignorance of the "H'outside world" does not prevent her blazingly disarming charm from winning the heart of the "businessman" sent from Cape Town.
This is no cheesy "love conquers all" story - Mill is elderly, and Mr Hansen is not deterred from his task - but the emotional hum between them highlights the ambiguous motives and shifting tensions in a world where whole communities became politicians' pawns.
Harris has loosely based her play on the lives of inhabitants evacuated from the Atlantic Island of Tristan da Cunha in 1961, although the political events are based on intelligent assumption rather than fact.
Niki Turner's beautiful, shimmering set ensures that the audience first sees the island with a childlike wonder: and it is this all-pervading sense of childlike simplicity that preserves the poetic beauty of a play more resonant with moods than ideas, even when it depicts human machinations at their most complex and murky.
A second viewing of the play increases admiration of the skill with which Harris handles her themes, even though the first act does feel very slow-moving.
In the partial recasting, Paul Shelley as Hansen seems too abrupt to create the essential chemistry between himself and Dionisotti, but ultimately this does not detract from a production simmering with Harris's talent.
Further Than The Furthest Thing
