Sat on the Blackwater Estuary just off the Essex coast is a genuine English curio: the private island of Osea. Connected to the mainland by a meandering Roman causeway, it can only be accessed for four hours each day before the pebbled path is submerged by the tide. For the 5,000 years it’s been occupied, this bucolic 160-hectare (400-acre) island has been blanketed in secrecy, hosting everything from Viking burial grounds and classified military bases to scandalous rehab centres and, now, luxury holidaymakers and party animals.
The island’s chequered past makes it fertile grounds for storytelling; it’s beguiling nature is exactly what Dennis Kelly and Felix Barrett were looking for when they set out to create their groundbreaking new Sky psychological thriller, The Third Day. Starring Jude Law, Naomie Harris, Katherine Waterston and Emily Watson, the show tells the individual but interconnected tales of Sam (Law) and Helen (Harris), both of whom journey to the island at different times and become engulfed in its secrets as they attempt to unlock the truth.
“I had this idea that our main guy would have something inside that he was searching for, that was unanswered,” says co-creator Kelly. “If he came to this place and saw what at first seems to be a parochial idyll, he might think there were answers there. If you lived in the city and had lots of turmoil inside you, you might go to a nice place in the country and think: ‘This is great, I’m moving here,’ only to find that place has its own problems and more.”
Kelly drew on Osea island’s convalescent history for the plot. For decades, the island was associated with drug and alcohol rehabilitation. In 1903, Frederick Charrington, an East End philanthropist and the son of one of London’s biggest brewery owners, bought the island and opened a treatment centre for those struggling with alcohol and opiate addictions. Patients, in return for free treatment, remained on the island to work the arable land. “We extrapolated from that,” Kelly says, “and thought: ‘Well, what if that small group of people had stayed and built their own community here?’”
The community Sam and Helen encounter in The Third Day has formed its own version of Christianity and is gearing up for a festival. The inhabitants’ oddness gives everything a sinister quality, which also fits with Osea’s real-life past. During the first and second world wars, the island was requisitioned by the army and was secretly used as a torpedo manufacturing base, before it once again housed a rehab and mental health facility known as The Causeway Retreat, famously attended by Amy Winehouse in 2008. The facility was shut down in 2010 by health regulators and a subsequent prosecution unearthed substandard practices and inadequate care.
The Causeway Retreat was popular because of the isolation and privacy that Osea island offered its patients. Following its closure, the seclusion has once again been exploited, this time in the form of luxury holidays and private events. The island boasts a small “village”– a cluster of period cottages gathered around a willow pond – a “clubhouse” made up of a colonial style chapel, and three further beach-side properties spread out across its four-mile coast. Still, despite its status as a playground for the wealthy and famous, Osea island doesn’t exude luxury like private islands in the Caribbean or the Maldives might. At its heart is still that haunting, ethereal quality, both enchanting and menacing, that defines the unwieldiness and beauty of the British countryside.
This wildness offered complications, mainly the changing tides, which Philippa Lowthorpe, the director of the show’s third part, Winter, describes as “the bane of everybody’s life”.
“In my part of the trilogy, Winter, we often needed the tide to be in, so we were always planning the shoot around those bloody tides that would only stay in the same place for about one minute!” she recalls. “Sometimes in the wind, the rain and the cold, you’d think: ‘Why did we say we’d do this?’”
That reasoning would become clear, however, when the team captured the magic and atmosphere of the island. “There was one day when we had to get up before dawn to film [the character] Helen driving across the causeway. I was in the crane with the director of photography David Chizallet, and we followed her blue car across, filming as we went,” Lowthorpe says. “The water on either side of the causeway was pure silver, the sun was like a low disc of light, the enormous pale sky was like a glowing being. Osea looked like a mythical place in a shining sea. We were all shouting with excitement at the astonishing shots we were getting. When you drive across the causeway it feels like you’re travelling a winding ancient route to a mystical world.” The lines between the fiction of the show they were making and the realities of the island began to blur. “There’s less artifice, which is a joy,” says the show’s producer, Adrian Sturges.
The immersive nature of Osea island also allowed Kelly and Barrett to experiment with the nature of their storytelling. Produced by innovative theatre company Punchdrunk, of which Barrett is the founder, the second part of the story, “Autumn”, will be broadcast as-live and in one continuous take. “The broadcast will feature Jude Law along with other members of the cast: there’ll be moments of suspense, intrigue and surprise over the course of the day,” Barrett says.
What The Third Day and its island setting ultimately demonstrates is the power that our surroundings hold, and how that unlocks unknown truths about ourselves and the world around us. But while the mysteries and drama at the heart of The Third Day might be fictional, the real-life story of this island is intriguing in its own right.
The Third Day is available now on Sky
