Outlying Islands - Softcover

In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, two young Cambridge ornithologists arrive on a remote, uninhabited Scottish island, sent by the government to survey the island's birds. With them on the island are Kirk, the authoritarian leaseholder, and his niece Ellen, a young woman in love with the stars of silent comedy. Left alone on a scrap of land surrounded by the vast Atlantic, they observe each other. Poetic, intense and gripping, Outlying Islands is a glimpse of an innocence, a way of seeing and a way of being young that is about to be destroyed forever. Outlying Islands was premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in July 2002 and transferred to the Royal Court, London in Autumn 2002.

David Greig was born in Edinburgh. His plays include Europe, The Architect, The Speculator, The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, Outlying Islands, San Diego, Pyrenees, The American Pilot, Yellow Moon: The Ballad of Leila and Lee, Damascus, Midsummer [a play with songs], Dunsinane, The Monster in the Hall and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. In 1990 he co-founded Suspect Culture to produce collaborative, experimental theatre work. His translations and adaptations include Camus's Caligula, Euripides' The Bacchae, Strindberg's Creditors and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.