Further Than the Furthest Thing

Synopsis

1961. On a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic, secrets are buried. When the outside world comes calling, intent on manipulation for political and economic ends, the islanders find their world blown apart from the inside as well as beyond. Eighteen months later, England. The islanders struggle to make sense of an unfamiliar world. Mixing fact and fiction, Further than the Furthest Thing is inspired by events on Tristan da Cunha and evokes the sadness and beauty of a civilisation in crisis. It won the 1999 Peggy Ramsay Award which included a gift of £35,000.

Our Review:

29 May 2001

For me, the really interesting thing about Mutiny on the Bounty wasn’t what happened with Captain Bligh on the ship but what Fletcher Christian and his cohorts got up to afterwards on dry land. Tales of in-breeding, isolation, murder and madness on tiny Pitcairn Island, where the mutineers set down, continue to fascinate me.

The setting for Zinnie Harris' Further than the Furthest Thing is a similarly remote and haunted island outpost. It's modelled on the real-life Tristan da Cunha, a volcanic hiccup cropped up in the Atlantic halfway between South Africa and South America.

The island community is made up of 170 souls who share just seven surnames. An odd bunch they are, too. Though the time is 1961, it feels like we're caught in a much more ancient time warp. After so long cut off from the "H'outside Warld", the islanders are a bundle of sepia-toned cultural influences. They wear flat caps, headscarves and thick woollen socks and speak in a patois...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 16 January 2002:

The most memorable new play I've seen in years, still pretty vivid though I saw it at the Traverse Fest before last. Alix, Edinburgh...

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