Prophets review – a mysterious tale of faith at the end of the world

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.

All this starts promisingly in the well-acted production directed by Fraser Scott. MacGregor’s political sense suggests there could be some kind of cover-up going on behind the slow-moving administrative machinery of this faraway remnant of the British empire, compounding the impression of an out-of-control cult taking its lead from a rewritten Bible.

But as Prophets plays out, it increasingly feels as if the real drama is somewhere else. Kerris, it transpires, has a personal interest in charismatic religious leaders, but her backstory is hazy and slow to reveal itself. We get too fleeting an insight into whatever trauma she went through in Scotland.

And for as long as she is outside the cult looking in, we feel at one remove from the action on the island. It means we are left with the uncontroversial message that cults are a bad thing, and get only a shallow perspective on the social forces that make such religious conviction attractive in the first place.

• At Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, until 31 August.
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