The Offshore Island (1959)

It is England, eight years after the outbreak of an H-bomb war.

Production credits

Acting credits

Synopsis

The time is eight years after the outbreak of atomic war in which Europe has been destroyed by Russian and American missiles. The place is England - the offshore island - where life has been almost exterminated and the play concerns a tiny isolated pocket of survival - a family of three living in a farmhouse. Their idyll is shattered when a detachment of American troops arrive.
Ann Todd and Robert Brown in The Offshore Island

The Radio Times carried a feature on the play:

'It was more something you felt, like a nightmare. There were those days...we just lay on the floor and I held the children and tried to keep their heads buried in cushions so that they shouldn't look up. They'd said we mustn't look or we'd be blinded. You couldn't think for the noise. I don't know how long it was before it died away but when it did, we were still alive.' So says Rachel Verney as she reflects on thehorrors of the past in Marghanita Laski's moving and provocative play The Offshore Island. When we meet Rachel Verney, who will be played by Ann Todd, she is a young widow living with her two children James and Mary in an isolated valley which has somehow escaped contamination. James has a strong love for their farm and longs to see it grow and develop. Mary, like all young teenage girls, longs for pretty dresses, dances, and a boyfriend: an ordinary family with ordinary hopes and ambitions, yet their lives have become extraordinary

Robert Brown, Tim Seely, Diane Clare, and Ann Todd as they appear in 'The Offshore Island'

for it is eight years since they have had any communication with the outside world. When their solitude is broken by the arrival of a party of Americans, their joy is great, but it quickly turns to fear as they face a new terror. Although viewers will remember seeing the Star Choice presentation of Miss Laski's novel The Victorian Chaise-Longue and cinemagoers will remember the film version of another of her novels, Little Boy Lost, The Offshore Island is her first play. Whether she is questioning a challenger on What's My Line?, answering a deeply involved question in The Brains Trust, or writing a play or a novel, Miss Laski shows that she has an instinctive understanding of not only the everyday problems that people have to face but also of the larger problems caused by science advancing more rapidly than the wisdom of man. To be able to express the fears that a rise out of these problems through the mouths of characters we can all recognise in a language we can all understand is to be a true writer. When I first read Little Boy Lost, perhaps Miss Laski's most famous novel, I found it to be one of those great joys in life, 'a book one couldn't put down,' and who can deny that the last lines of that book are among the most moving in contemporary literature? I can say the same of The Offshore Island. Having begun to read it, I had to know what happened next - a simple criterion, although it is fashionable to decry it; but unless your reader, or with a television play, your viewer, wants to know what-happens next, a writer has failed in his task. Miss Laski is a true writer indeed, and a true story-teller.

Notes

Marghanita Laski began writing this play in the early 1950s. The BBC bought the play in 1957 but sat on it for two years. Laski said she wished they had not kept it for so long because the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had just formed and it might look like she wrote the play for the purposes of propaganda.

Star Ann Todd had been robbed near her home in 1958 and declared that she would never again appear in a play that had anything to do with violence. However, she was so moved by the play, and coupled with the memory of a lecture by Bertrand Russell about the H-bomb, that she relaxed her view.

Tim Seely appeared by arrangement with Ealing MGM Artists Ltd.