acts and sacraments of mad, dumb, vicious power. Horton states that she was inspires to write Islands when she looked deeper into tax havens and discovered the real human cost that they wreck. The lives that are prematurely ended or turned to misery because of them. It’s unsurprising then that her response flows out like a furious stream of invective, that it has those same qualities of rage and the same end-point of sensible language and imagery that we find in Pasolini and Bataille. Meeting obscenity, Horton matches it with the obscene.

The gang, wild Mary, feeble Agent (John Biddle) and fun-loving Swill (Seiriol Davies), communicate in snatches of corrupted song and nursery rhyme – they are vulgar, and they speak in ugly, obvious phrases. There is no poetryor intelligence to their speech, and as they dominate the stage almost throughout the play, there is consequently little in the surface text of Islands. Their grasp on the lives of those in Shitworld is tenuous, they fear them only in so far as they have the ability to curtail their freedoms. You don’t have to stare as deep into the toilet bowl as Jimmy Savile to recognise those tendencies in those invested with the freedom power and money bring and who are determined to keep it.

The narrative, such as it is, sees the gradual corruption of a new Adam (Simon Startin) and Eve (Hannah Ringham) by the forces of these wealthy gods, a plot which naturally suggests its own origin story. Eve transgresses and is cast out,