When the RSC invited Brad Birch to write a play about Britain, his first impulse was to travel 8,000 miles, to the Falkland Islands. His uncle had served in the conflict over the colony and, 40 years on, Birch wondered about the islanders’ experience – forgotten people who for 74 days were the centre of the world’s attention.
Aldo Vázquez’s design has a model village charm –miniature versions of the distinctive clapboard houses on a felty floor of moss and khaki. It’s like an English rural town – though its climate is forbidding, its roads lumpy (“imagine a carpet made out of porridge”) and breakfast is scrambled penguin eggs.
