Song of the Western Man, Minerva Theatre, Chichester

The island of lost content

If no man is an island, does it follow that no island should be an island either? By coincidence, the summer has brought us two new plays – both set on islands just before the outbreak of war in 1939 – that explore this question. First up was Outlying Islands by David Greig, which presents that time of impending crisis through the experience of two young Cambridge naturalists dispatched on government business to a remote Hebridean spot. Now, premiered in Andy Brereton's charming production, Song of the Western Men, by Christopher William Hill examines how the residents of St Martin's in the Isles of Scilly struggle to come to terms with the changes and interferences from the outside world as the nation readies itself for war.

Greig's play approached the subject from an arresting angle. The naturalists discover that they are unwitting accomplices in a secret biological weapons test. The fate of the uninhabited island is to be like that of real-life Gruinard, which was left contaminated for decades after the military bombed it with anthrax. But why should an entire bird population be wiped out just so as to help safeguard a proportion of mankind? The inhuman lengths (implicitly likened to Fascist racism) to which one of the scientists is prepared to go to protect non-human life give the drama its thought-provoking chill.

There are also moments in Song of the Western Men where the perspective suddenly shifts and the ideological conflicts of men, seen ranged against the vast indifference of nature, start to look like parochial tiffs. The grandmother (Mary Wimbush) has scavenged sufficient shipwrecks to know that the bodies of all nationalities look the same ("a great heap of stinking jelly") after a week in water. In general, though, this appealing black comedy has a more conventional focus – dramatising the conflict between the desire to preserve the integrity of life on the Scillies in all its unspoilt, if constricting, insularity and the duty to connect with the modern world in the interests of more widespread survival.

It is the reluctant postmaster Vic (Ian Brimble) who feels this clash most keenly. When an official from the mainland comes to install a new telegraph machine, Vic's resistance to new technology borders on the disturbed. It results in a kind of nervous breakdown and his drop-out decampment to the seashore, evoked, in Gary McCann's beautifully imaginative set, by underfoot glass cabinets of marine life. Here, joined by Peter Baldwin's amusingly bland cleric and Christopher Naylor's distraught post-office bureaucrat, Vic gradually reveals the reasons, which are connected with family and the First World War, for his phobia.

Hill has an alert eye for the telling detail. One reason the sexually frustrated teenager Morwenna (excellent Saman-tha Robinson) dreams of the mainland is because of its electric lighting. She's sick of her clothes always smelling of oil. He's good, too, at conveying the touchingly comic gaucheness of the island's youth. The play has its clumsy patches and sometimes the texture is too thin, but in its empathy with the psychological ambivalence of being an isolated islander and its ability to turn that predicament into metaphor, this is a work of distinct promise.

To 7 September (01243 781312)