AS part of the Stephen Joseph Theatre's 60th anniversary season, Tim Firth's man-watching exercise, Neville's Island, is making a splash in Scarborough for the first time since its 1992 premiere.

Like that other physically demanding northern four-hander, John Godber's Bouncers, Firth's comic drama has played anywhere and everywhere, thanks to its winning format of being an endurance test for the actors but an absolute joy for the audience.

One by one, in SJT associate director Henry Bell's most welcome revival, four middle-management suits from a Salford mineral water company make an undignified entrance, fully clothed but soaked to the skin as they scramble ashore a Derwentwater island after their navigational skills go awry on a team-building exercise on a fog-bound November day.

Optimistic marketing manager, amateur sleuth, abysmal map reader and team captain Neville (Daniel Crowder), anxious distribution manager Angus (John Last), bullying production manager Gordon (Craig Cheetham) and God-fearing, bird-watching Roy (Jamie Chapman) are marooned: middle-aged, muddle-brained, out of condition, out of their depth and out of contact in the Lake District.

Over 48 hours, their survival instincts will be taxed beyond the bounds of a conventional outward bound course. Angus's mobile phone has juice enough for only one call to his errant wife and the food supplies amount to one lousy left-over sausage from breakfast. What use now will be the gadgets and gizmos in Angus's immaculately stocked survival rucksack? Only as tools for comedy and a cause of rousing anger in the scornful Gordon, whose own bag has gone missing, but not his stock of exploding sarcasm bombs.

Firth's hugely humorous but disturbingly dark play is a study of a group falling apart when they need to pull together, as day turns to night and bullying, office politics and demons rise to the surface on an extreme journey into the inner self.

York Press:

Jamie Chapman's Roy, at the end of his tether in Neville's Island. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

This portrait of human inadequacies, frayed English manners and men behaving madly is often billed as an adult variation on Lord Of The Flies – Firth even contemplated calling it Lord Of The Files – but Bell's non-naturalistic staging has echoes of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now too in the way it plays with the head.

To assist this in The Round setting, Bell and his designer Lucy Weller create an open landscape of heightened colours – psychedelic pink, white and red shapes on the floor – and only one tree trunk, in contrast to the sand, soil, foliage and claustrophobic trees favoured by so many productions. Coincidentally or not, the final image is of a dead bird on Roy's shoulders, its white feathers blotched by pinky, red blood.

Bell's cast superbly portray four dysfunctional men locked into beleaguered circumstances from which they can't escape: Crowder's floundering yet ever hopeful Neville; Last's slow-burning, wounded Angus; Cheetham's sour, ultimately self-loathing Gordon and in particular Chapman's troubled Roy, as his safety nets of prayer fall away. Water torture shouldn't be this much fun...for the audience.

Neville's Island, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until August 27. Box office: 01723 370541 or at sjt.uk.com