Take four middle managers and drop them on an island in the Lake District in the middle of November and what do you have? A comic, adult version of Lord Of The Flies, as Charles Hutchinson discovers.

A BANK of trees in the Walmgate rehearsal rooms indicates a company at work on outdoor pursuits.

Real trees, real grass and water will take over the York Theatre Royal main-house stage from next Friday, as the natural vegetation and lake setting for Damian Cruden's production of Neville's Island.

First staged 11 years ago at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, the play catapulted playwright Tim Firth into the West End and onwards to All Quiet On the Preston Front, Once Upon A Time In the North and the Madness musical Our House.

Until now, the Theatre Royal has been reluctant to perform Firth's theatre work because of the proximity of Scarborough, where several of his plays have been premiered. However, Neville's Island is too good to resist and it has not been seen on a Yorkshire stage for a while.

"It's good to be doing a play that was commissioned by a Yorkshire theatre company, made in Yorkshire and is now coming back to Yorkshire," says Damian Cruden. "Neville's Island is just a very clever play. It's very well made, full of depth and layers, but really fun to do... if hard work for the actors."

Time then for the Theatre Royal to take the plunge, just like the four middle managers from the Pennine Spring Water Company as they trade in office politics for that fashionable exercise of the 1990s, team building in the great outdoors.

Dubbed a "comedic, adult Lord Of The Flies" by the Guardian, Neville's Island sends Neville, Gordon, Angus and Roy outward bound and out of their depth on Derwent Water in the Lake District. Cue men behaving madly, struggling with abysmal map reading, thick fog and their inner self.

If these are tough conditions for the middle managers, they are tough too for the cast of John Paul Connolly, Eamonn Fleming, Robert Pickavance and Colin Tarrant, whose preparations have included a session in the training pool at Emperors Health and Fitness Centre in Skeldergate.

"Well, working with me is an endurance test," says a joking Damian Cruden. "But we haven't taken them out into the wild and left them there, given that I know they would only cheat. Someone would take a credit card and book in somewhere. So, in reality, we're all just trying to remember what it was like to be a Scout."

Joking aside, the cast must convey the extreme conditions faced by four men struggling in alien territory. "The play covers 48 hours without food, without shelter, and it's November, in the Lake District - and I would not like to be out in the Lake District, in November, without food, shelter or warmth for two days. It's dangerous, especially for those who don't know how to survive in those conditions.

"For actors, playing extremes like that is hard work. Not as hard as working down a pit for a living, but hard enough because the characters' emotional journeys are complex and, in terms of developing character, each scene is taxing."

Neville's Island may be a Nineties' play but its theme is no less relevant today. Damian says: "The play is really about bullying. Tim Firth isn't criticising the need to have manage-ment skill training weekends but he uses that setting to look at four dysfunctional middle-aged men who are locked into circumstances from which they can't escape. It becomes impossible for them not to face up to their demons in what turns into an extreme situation."

Healthy exercise or not, this team-building activity is certainly revealing: perfect material for a play.

Neville's Island runs at York Theatre Royal from June 6 to 28. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 10:25 Friday, May 30, 2003