On the third consecutive day of record May temperatures, the Burton Taylor Studio is probably the best place in Oxford to spend the evening. This tiny performance space is blessed with a ginormous air-conditioning machine, and the kindly front-of-house manager Rob has decreed that it will stay on throughout the show. Your sweat cools, your mind clears, and by the end of Gabriel Meadowcroft's new play, No Peace on St Jude, you're freezing. Bliss.
The cold in the room is matched by the weather on the tiny, fictional island of St Jude, where the play is set. It's a windswept, rocky outpost, peopled entirely by misfits who have come here to get away from their secret pasts. There's newcomer George, a doctor who clearly did something so dreadful that he's come all the way from the United States, and never wants to return. (We're not told what terrible thing George did - or if we are I must have missed it - but it can't have been that bad, because his business partner Paul turns up on the island twice to beg him to return in order to pacify the investors. If he'd accidentally killed a patient you'd have thought the investors would be in no hurry to have him back.)
At the heart of the community is Dennis, a simple soul with a bike and a drink problem. Dennis is acted with verve by author Meadowcroft, who also directs the play, so this is very much his passion project.
There's also publican and ex-policeman Tommy, who is constantly hinting at the terrible things he's seen. There's Gladys, a gossip-monger with eyes that roll like twin Catherine wheels, and her son Dai, who had a nasty accident involving an assailant and some sheep. And there's Evelyn, who seems to be the only sane resident of St Jude.
Together the villagers discover that they can run but not hide from their pasts. The island is a symbol of both discovering the value of a simple life, and of the impossibility of escaping responsibility. And if those two symbols seem to be pulling in opposite directions, both salvation and damnation, then (depending on your view) that either adds to the complexity or confusion of the play.
When George tells money-man Paul (who is about as two-dimensional a critique of corporate life as you could wish for) that he's staying on St Jude because he's discovered true peace there, it's hard to reconcile his Candide-like idealism with the fact that the other islanders are committing suicide left, right and centre. But there's a tug of natural wonder about this play too. Even on a completely undecorated stage — with nothing to suggest an island, a cottage, or even a clump of soggy grass — the play conjures a convincing sense of wild remoteness. And George's immersion in, conversion to, and seduction by the place has a sense of Under Milk Wood magic. It's like Local Hero without the humour.
As the characters reluctantly open up to each other, their confessions beg more questions from the audience. If, like Dai, they have committed crimes, why aren't the police picking them up? St Jude isn't secret or inaccessible - the locals refer to the daily ferry multiple times. And if money-man Paul is prepared to give George two weeks to pack up and say his farewells, why did he bother travelling there to fetch him - especially since he's already sent a letter? These little inconsistencies may betray a degree of uncertainty in the writing, but they aren't fatal. Arguably they add to the mystery of the scenario.
There's also perhaps a bit too much sermonising in the latter stages of the play, as characters tell each other repeatedly about the value of finding their true selves / having to face up to the past. Meadowcroft could turn those 90 minutes into 70 with a little judicious cutting, and lose none of the play's impact.
St Jude, in case you didn't know, is the patron saint of lost causes (as well as Armenia, and the Chicago Fire Department.) The inhabitants of the island are - even if they don't realise it - all lost causes themselves. But in one of the play's finer touches of irony, they naively believe he's the patron saint of hope. Tonight, while giving us a thought-provoking if rudimentary production, he also showed himself to be the patron saint of air conditioning. Praise him.