'Outlying Islands', premiered at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 2002, offers a poetic and intense glimpse of an innocence, a way of seeing and a way of being young that is about to be destroyed forever. In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, two young Cambridge ornithologists arrive on a remote, uninhabited Scottish island, sent by the government to survey the island's birds. With them on the island are Kirk, the authoritarian leaseholder, and his niece Ellen, a young woman in love with the stars of silent comedy. Left alone on a scrap of land surrounded by the vast Atlantic, they observe each other.