

‘Further than the Furthest Thing’ review
Zinnie Harris’s second play ‘Further than the Furthest Thing’ isn’t necessarily a masterpiece. But there’s much about it that is still compelling, and once it gets going Jennifer Tang’s Young Vic revival feels intensely worthwhile. The 1999 drama is based on real-life 1961 events on the extremely remote British territory of Tristan da Cunha, a far-flung group of volcanic islands midway between South America and Africa. As the play begins, wayward son of the island Francis (Archie Madekwe) has returned after a spell working in South Africa. He has been raised by his formidable aunt Mill (Jenna Russell) and on-edge uncle Bill (Cyril Nri), two idiosyncratic island folk who speak with endearingly idiosyncratic accents as they fret over the three eggs (‘h’eggs’) that Mill has acquired by way of a celebration of Francis’s return. The young man has brought a guest: creepy, vulpine South African glass jar magnate Mr Hansen (Gerald Kyd), whose haughty mainland demeanour gets him off to a rocky start with Mill and Bill. But he ultimately wows them: with some nifty magic tricks, and with a proposal that he’ll bring industry to the island by opening a crawfish processing plant. There’s a rambling quality to the first half, which sets the play up as a showdown between salt-of-the-earth islanders and the sharp-suited representative of Big Jar. Tang’s fitfully bombastic staging, with an extremely nifty eco-friendly, amphitheatre-style set from Soutra Gilmour, teeters between viscerally ent