Four women on work trip stuck on island...

SET in the Lake District on Bonfire Night in awful weather, Sheila’s Island may not sound the most attractive destination.

But in fact the play is a situation comedy with slapstick and belly laughs as well as more dramatic moments.

It was written by Tim Firth, who penned the award-winning musical Our House and the theatrical adaptation of Calendar Girls, and is being staged by the Sinodun Players at Wallingford Corn Exchange next week.

Sheila’s Island is about four work colleagues, Sheila, Denise, Julie and Fay, who are on an outward bound team-building weekend.

Sheila, the team leader, uses her cryptic crossword solving skills to unwittingly strand the women on an island. They make weapons from cable ties and spatulas and create a rescue flag from plastic plates and a toasting fork as the characters clash and emotions run high.

Gloria Wright, the director of this production, says: “The premise is that it’s one of these company team-building exercises, so they’re all there with varying degrees of attitude towards it.

“Some is at the extreme end of awful and at the other end, it’s sort of, ‘Oh, this is going to be great’.

“It all goes a little bit wrong at the beginning and we see how they interact and cope once they’re stranded on this island, which is in the middle of Derwentwater. I know people will laugh at all sorts of things. We are still laughing at some of the jokes in there. It’s so clever the way Tim Firth builds up certain things and then it kind of turns on itself and becomes very funny.

“The reason the play works so well is that the four women are very different. I’m sure people will recognise most of these characters.

“There’s one in particular who thinks she’s incredibly funny and she jokes all the time. The trouble is that, after a while, particularly when you can’t get away from it, the jokes are not funny anymore.

“You have got these people who are gradually getting more and more on your nerves and truths are coming out, all that sort of thing.

“In the second act, you’re still laughing and then suddenly you think, ‘Oh, actually, I can see that this is going somewhere that I didn’t think it was going to go’.” Alex Reid plays Sheila with Rebecca Cleverley as Fay, Charlotte Lloyd as Julie and Becky Lee as Denise.

“I was really lucky,” says Gloria. “A lot of people turned up to audition so I was blessed with having a real choice of actors. I’ve been able to choose four people who can really bring out the subtleties as well as the obvious.

“Whereas normally you would think of being washed up on a deserted island as, ‘Oh, that’ll be nice’, this is decidedly not nice. It’s November, it’s very foggy and cold.

“All the girls arrive on stage having swum the last little bit, so the actors are absolutely soaked.

“It has got to be realistic as far as I’m concerned — it just wouldn’t work if we were saying the words but everyone in the audience could see they looked bone-dry. It’s not glamorous — it’s four actors who are prepared to suffer for their art.”

She credits the set with effecting the look of a wet, miserable place in the middle of nowhere when the women would rather be back home at the spa. It was designed by Greg Ryder and Mike Simmons with lighting by John Evans.

Gloria says: “I said to the team, ‘Look, it’s set on a rocky island, so we can’t be doing it on a flat stage and we want water. They’ve created this wonderful rocky island with the water lapping around it.

“We’ve got a projection of the actual scene from an island across Derwentwater as one of our members went up to the Lake District to research and take those shots for us.

“When you have projection on stage, you’ve got to leave space at the back for the image, which is full-size. Early on the team said to me, ‘Well, you’re going to lose 3m of stage depth’. I said, ‘That’s absolutely fine’ because I wanted this feeling of being trapped in a small space. There’s a lot of ‘fog’ involved as well.

“It’s not an easy play — it’s a challenge. There are something like 380 cues that the stage manager has to call every night in between lights and sounds, the projection and the fog. You get tension and you get fear and all of that. It’s very much a black comedy.”

• The Sinodun Players present Sheila’s Island at Wallingford Corn Exchange from Tuesday to Saturday, May 23 to 27 at 7.45pm, with a Saturday matinée at 2.45pm. Tickets cost £9 (Tuesday) and £12 (Wednesday to Saturday). The show has a running time of two-and-a-half hours. For more information and to buy tickets, call the box office on (01491) 825000 or visit cornexchange.org.uk