Now this is proper hardcore Fringing: two actors and a sheet of plastic in a thin-walled box of a venue, together conjuring an epic thriller about a woman who has travelled to the ends of the earth only to become entangled with an esoteric cult on a farflung, half-forgotten Pacific island.
The protagonist of Jack MacGregor’s play is Kerris (Rebecca Wilkie), a paleoclimatologist (or so she says). She has come to the obscure British dependency of Saint John – an island with a population of 48 – to analyse the local rocks and corals for evidence of prehistoric weather systems.
When we first meet her, the rather guarded woman is talking to Joe (Xander Cowan), the Kiwi-accented local who will serve as her contact on the island. He is friendly but flighty, and becomes agitated when Kerris starts asking him about the weird Bible she found in her room, which contains disturbing additional chapters attributed to a mysterious religious figure known only as The Prophet.
Fraser Scott’s production is fluid, gripping and scary
I don’t really want to say loads more than that because as you might imagine, MacGregor’s narrative contains a fair number of twists and turns. It also smartly keeps you guessing as to which genre it is: folk horror? Action thriller? Detective story? But I think it’s fair to divulge that as the story flashes back to Kerris’s encounters with a succession of other characters back in Britain (all played by Cowan), it becomes apparent that she is not a Sgt Howle-style innocent who has arrived with no inkling of the island’s secrets – instead she has pushed through a confounding veil of tight lips and sealed records to reach this point.
You probably couldn’t just plonk Prophets on a major stage as is: aside from the ultra-low budget set (albeit with cool lighting), there are aspects of the script that need refining and deepening: its glancing allusions to geopolitics feel underexplored; Kerris’s motives need to be worked upon. But there’s so much promise here and Fraser Scott’s production is fluid, gripping and scary, with two really rock solid performances from Wilkie and Cowan.
And it would be so much more expensive to tell this story on screen or even a bigger stage – how wonderful is it that two actors and a plastic sheet can take us to a desolate, cursed island on the other side of the world? It’s pure Fringe magic.
