O, Island
★★★
Ivy Tiller, Vicar’s Daughter, Squirrel Killer
★
The Other Place
Stratford-Upon-Avon

THE post-Covid re-emergence of the RSC’s Mischief Festival in its Stratford studio theatre, designed to introduce new writing, features a double bill of two ambitious short plays full of topical references, both in need of directorial editing.

O, Island by Nina Seagal is a dystopian parable set in a Home Counties village not a million miles from Ambridge, isolated by river floodwaters.

It moves from knock-about comedy, with the local Tory MP determined at all costs to snatch a publicity photograph of his heroic rescuing performance, being rejected by the villagers, who establish an independent islet state led by the articulate, grandmotherly Margaret.

This promised Utopia, “a return to an idyllic community,” free from outside infection rapidly turns into a fenced-in Atlantis where the local pageant becomes a neofascist rally, people are disappeared and children taken for re-education.

This sinister development is all done with an overlay of benevolence and humour, but the play is hampered by the playwright’s determination that her message must register.

Inge, the documentary film-maker narrator, deciding not just to record events but to shape them, urges us to confront history — “We must all do more than witness.”

She challenges the benign Trumpish Margaret with a long explanatory speech — “You can’t just choose a truth and make it so” — before being gently drowned in a bath.

Never mind, it all ends happily with the adolescent Laurie assuring us that “we won’t always be an island.”

Bea Roberts’ Ivy Tiller is the central character in a farrago of a play about a disturbed conservationist obsessed by the need to eradicate grey squirrels in order to preserve their native red version.

Despite energetic work from the cast, the 90 minutes seemed much longer as the audience struggle to work out where characters fit into this jigsaw of a play — are there missing pieces or are they so jumbled that the business of sorting them out is just too exhausting?

Runs until November 5 2022. Box office: 01789 331-111, rsc.org.uk.