Jack MacGregor is a Fringe First award-winning playwright from the Scottish Highlands, best known for their plays Our Brother, Everything Under the Sun and Nightlands. Their new work, Prophets, described as a psychological thriller/folk horror story, debuts this year at the Edinburgh Fringe and has won the Assembly’s ART Award.

Unfortunately, this short play starts well, promises much but ultimately disappoints. It’s a version of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, but it’s the – not quite suitable for children – Disney version.

“Oh the Horror!”

The story is more like a queer fairy tale, where a princess rescues a prince from a wicked wizard. With all the hallmarks of a heroic myth, it ends with the symbolic, mystical union of female and male.

A young Scottish woman, Kerris (Rebecca Wilkie) travels to Saint John, a tiny island of 40 inhabitants, in the South Pacific on the premise of carrying out some obscure scientific study. There she meets a sweet young man, Joe (Xander Cowan)  who tells her about a Prophet on the island who can perform miracles.

Kerris has not come to Saint John to study rocks and coral, but on the basis of countless shocking reports on social media, she has another aim in mind.

She believes that the people on this outpost of the old British Empire are being manipulated in some way by the government for tactical reasons because of the island’s prime position in the defence of the Pacific.

As the story unfolds we discover that Kerris and Joe have secrets in common. As Joe has been in the Prophet’s cult since childhood, you may have already guessed his secret…

When Kerris finally gets to meet the Prophet, it is on the long-awaited “Day of Paradise” when all hell is let loose.

It is frustrating that in this serious little play, the tribal and psychological nature of cults is not examined in any way, and we learn little about the cult leader other than that he is very, very evil. This reinforces my fairytale thesis – this play is not about cults in the Pacific.

There is so much information available concerning the real Cargo Cults of Melanesia which could have been used for inspiration. Why set the action in the Pacific if the population is white and the island “looks like home” as Kerris says? It might just as well have been set on a Scottish Island in the North Atlantic.

The minimal set comprises of a white nylon tarpaulin partially covered in black gravel, and three white plastic chairs. There is a smoke machine and hand-held battery torches are used to great dramatic effect. So nothing obviously tropical here either.

At the end of the story, back in Scotland, Kerris and Joe are reunited and briefly discuss their life journeys, and the concept of predestination. They then consider, after all they have gone through – cringe – if a miracle might actually have happened.

The production is worth seeing for the brilliant performances by Wilkie and Cowan. Wilkie gets to play scenes where she runs the gamut of emotions, like your feisty BFF with PTSD. Cowan skilfully plays lovable Australian Joe, Kerris’ boring Scottish boyfriend, a pompous English civil servant, a critical American evangelist and the wicked Prophet himself.

Prophets has the potential to become a great play, but the story is flawed, and it tries to say too much with two actors in one hour. It needs to be rethought, developed and expanded.