Rating: 4 out of 5

RICHARD BEAN covers well-trodden ground in his new play. Utopias and their subsequent disillusionment have provided dreamscapes for artists and philosophers and political projects over the ages and that’s the subject of investigation in Pitcairn. 

There is a special relevance in that the mutiny on the Bounty and the beginning of its leader’s attempt to create a new Eden on a knob of volcanic rock, Pitcairn Island, happened in 1789 — the year when the French revolution launched the world into seas of hope and despair. 

Both the surname of revolt leader Fletcher Christian and the ship’s name Bounty suggest reward, with the purpose of its voyage to discover cheap breadfruit crops which could feed West Indian slaves. That carries an ironic loading.

Here, Tom Morley’s idealistic and youthful Christian — the historic figure was only 24 at the time — never really stood a chance dealing with his mixed crew of mutineers and Tahitians, whose men were recruited to help work this brave new world and whose women to people its future.

The arguments flow as readily as the plentiful rum salvaged from the hijacked ship. How is the islet, two miles by one mile, to be divided? Should it be a people’s communist community or a miniature enclosured recreation of England’s anything but green and pleasant homeland — “You have turned the Garden of Eden into Norwich,” is one remark. Are the Tahitian men to share equally? Even Christian dismisses the idea that the women might have a voice.

The ideological struggle — tradition versus a new beginning — is fuelled by sexual tensions as the mutineers contend for the readily willing native women whose culture regards sex as a natural consensual playground but treats rape on a par with murder.

Christian’s world, based on an ethic of mutual love, disintegrates: “Not yet two years in our Garden of Eden and we have a civil war.” 

Max Stafford-Clark’s touring production with his Out of Joint company’s universally splendid cast recreates a fast-moving sense of impending anarchy. The Tahitian women finally decide to take over while a totally disillusioned Christian, now a lone survivor of the mutiny, retreats into the very religious manipulation of power over people he had despised and attempted to extinguish.

The message must be that we have to start from the world we have rather than an unattainable clean slate.

Runs until October 11, then tours, details: outofjoint.co.uk