Outlying Islands, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Living at the edge of civilisation

An island as a heightened microcosm, a cut-off tabula rasa where the normal rules of the mainland can be suspended for a daring social experiment: this notion – admirably suited to the microcosmic space of the stage – has long intrigued dramatists, from Shakespeare in The Tempest, through Marivaux's Island of Slaves, to J M Barrie's The Admirable Crichton. The prolific young Scottish dramatist, David Greig, puts a beguilingly fresh, if not always convincing, spin on the idea in Outlying Islands, a piece premiered now in a potently atmospheric production by Philip Howard.

We are in the summer of 1939 and war looms. Two young, upper-class Cambridge naturalists are despatched by the government to a remote and uninhabited Scottish island. Their billet is a semi-subterranean, former pagan church and they are left for their month's stay in the care of Kirk (excellent Robert Carr), the grasping old bigot who owns the lease and the fowling rights, and his attractive, movie-mad niece, Ellen (Lesley Hart). Their stated mission is to make a scientific survey of the island's bird life, but it emerges, in their conversations with Kirk, who is crudely obsessed by the financial compensation he stands to gain, that the ministry has not been straight with them. It's not research, but "a census of the living dead" that the government requires, as part of a chemical-weapons test.

Though there's a rather artificial absence of any mention of Hitler or the fight against Fascism, you can see how this situation might harden a naturalist like Robert (the dangerously compelling Laurence Mitchell) in his belief that it is humans, with their unique invention of war and of God, who deserve the fate earmarked for the birds.

You can see, too, why Kirk's remark about the island's military attractiveness ("You can do what you like here and nobody need ever know") alerts Robert to its potential for other uninhibited practices. When the old man slumps dead from a somewhat assisted heart-attack, the stage is set for a scenario that looks likely to put the "horny" in "ornithologist", with Sam Heughan's likeably tentative and repressed John making up the third in this triangle of marooned survivors.

What follows suggests that Greig's great gift for illustrating ideas and alighting on resonant metaphors is not matched as yet by a talent for fleshing out character. Ellen, who liberates herself from convention with a speed that women two decades later would envy, feels like a construct designed to complicate the differences between the psychological types (gambler and saver) represented by the two men. But Robert, though largely a conceit, is a haunting creation. A scientist who views people and petrels with the same detached fascination, he turns into a visionary birdman who longs to transcend limits and become one with creaturely existence by hurling himself against the stormy sky. In this figure, the inhuman and the ardent (perhaps respectable) desire to be non-human are arrestingly entwined.

Venue 15: various times (1hr 45min), in rep to 24 August (0131-228 1404)