THE water and trees look full of foreboding, the air is dank, the light gloomy, and then the orchestral music swells in that nerve-tingling way favoured by movie makers in the mysterious Mississippi swamps. Could this be the start of a lagoon thriller?

The movie motif continues as a typewritten message spreads across the backdrop: Friday November 4th 1994. Derwent Water. The Lakes.

Not a lagoon, then! This is a typically witty start by director Damian Cruden, playing tricks with the audience's mind as Tim Firth's play will mess with the heads of its beleaguered characters.

One by one they emerge from the water, four middle managers from the Pennine Spring Water Company, shipwrecked on Rampsholme Island after their outward-bound exercise goes awry in the Lake District fog.

Spirits are high, amid conviction they will be rescued by nightfall, but those typed backdrop date and time details have only just started to tick over.

Naturally optimistic marketing manager, amateur sleuth and abysmal map reader Neville (John Paul Connolly) is the skipper for the day. By contrast cynical production manager Gordon (Colin Tarrant) is the office barbed wit, with a stock of "sarcasm bombs" to explode.

Cautious, meticulous distribution manager Angus (Eamonn Fleming) has the rucksack inventory to impress a mountaineer, but crucially his mobile phone is running low on power. Bird-watching Religious Roy (Robert Pickavance) is suffused with his own power supply, the power of prayer but he has only recently returned to work after a 13-month "holiday".

In the Lakes, no one can hear you scream, as a team-building exercise turns into a journey into personal hell in Firth's adult, northern version of Lord Of The Flies.

He has since written Preston Front, Once Upon A Time In The North and the Madness musical Our House, but this comic study of men behaving madly under pressure remains his best work, ten years on from its debut at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.

Designer Richard Foxton plays his part, creating an island corner of the Lake District from 15 tonnes of soil, 13 tonnes of water, six large trees and four van-loads of foliage that breathes with a life of its own.

Cruden's cast is excellent, both individually and, crucially, collectively. Pickavance finds new nuances in playing troubled Roy for the third time; Fleming makes a slow-burning, implosive, increasingly tender Angus; Connolly's Neville is forever hopeful like a labrador pup; and Tarrant applies first pepper then salt to the abrasive Gordon.

Water sports have never been such fun... for the audience.

Neville's Island,

Theatre Royal, York, until

June 28

Box office: 01904 623568

Updated: 12:51 Wednesday, June 11, 2003