Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh
A researcher encounters an isolated community in thrall to a mysterious religious leader in Jack MacGregor’s atmospheric but elusive drama
What impresses about Jack MacGregor as a playwright is their willingness to take us into the wider world. Nightlands was set in a deserted Russian research base in Svalbard; Everything Under the Sun concerned militias in Mali; and Our Brother played out in the Cambodia of Pol Pot. So it is with Prophets, which begins with the arrival of Kerris, a Scottish researcher, on the sparsely populated island of Saint John, a fictional British Overseas Territory in the South Pacific.
Played by Rebecca Wilkie, she is as curious about the religious activities of the islanders as she is the archaeological record of plant life she is supposedly there to study. Welcomed by Joe, a former merchant seaman played by a multitasking Xander Cowan, she senses something is amiss in the nightly church services led by an elusive man they call the prophet. Her job is about the dawn of time, but the locals are readying themselves for the end of days.
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