No man is an island - but many want one

Daniel Nelson

When Francis returns to his remote island home from a spell in South Africa he declares that he has brought a surprise from the outside world.

The surprise is Mr Hansen, a businessman with a plan. 

“I am a businessman first and foremost. You must remember that.” It’s a warning.

That confrontation sets the plot of Further Than The Furthest Thing in motion. The furthest thing is the island - unnamed but you would be forgiven for thinking Tristan da Cunha in the south Atlantic - and what happens there is an invasive strain on personal and economic relations.

This makes for a rich, complex play, which contrasts humanity and the need for survival in extreme situations; old, slow ways and industry; islands and mainland; traditional and modern knowledge; men and women, inlanders and outsiders. Stir in family and island secrets and you have a heady brew.

The ambitious weaving of themes is underscored by an early sense of impending doom - not just the suited stranger but “something under the water” - and sometimes undermined by stodgily obvious symbolism.

The second half is set in Hansen’s crayfish packing plant in Britain, and you can’t help thinking of the Chagos islanders, shipped off their island by the British to make way for a US base. Or perhaps Pacific islanders’ forced relocation after Western nuclear testing in the region. Or Marshallese who have moved from the Marshall Islands and name their children after homeland atolls now threatened by climate change and water and food shortages.

Indeed, the most interesting aspect of all the play’s conflicts is between the island and the mainland, the islanders and the outsiders. Mr Hansen tells an island woman that when he first arrived “I wanted the black sand. I even wanted you” - the voice of longing for the imagined purity and simplicity of remote island life and of a predatory and inevitably destructive force that seeks to possess the island dream but can never inhabit it.

First staged in 1999, the play is beautifully performed and presented. I can’t put my finger on why it never quite catches fire, but it resonates still.

* Further Than The Furthest Thing is at the Young Vic, 66 The Cut, until 28 April. Info: 7922 2922/  boxoffice@youngvic.org/  020 7922 2922

https://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/further-than-the-furthest-thing