Science fiction always tells you more about the present than the future. John Wyndham's classroom favourite might be set in some desolate landscape still to come, but it is rooted in the concerns of the mid-1950s. Published in 1955, it's a novel driven by the twin anxieties of the cold war and the atomic bomb. In the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, Wyndham asks, would we be as aggressive towards the mutant children as we are to the people of the Soviet Union?
Fifty years on, when our enemy has changed and our fear of nuclear catastrophe has subsided, his analysis of our tribal instinct is as pertinent as ever. The Fringe people, shadowy, unseen strangers living in tree houses and getting up to who knows what, could be modern-day asylum seekers. The supposedly civilised Waknuk characters, with their urge to kill their enemies and stick with their own, would be well at home in today's tense world of international relations.
There's something black-and-white about this, of course, which explains the large teenage audience attending this production by Glasgow's Complete. The lesson is good, the moral is simple: hey, be nice to each other, we're not so different after all. But right now it's a story that needs to be told.
David Harrower's adaptation was commissioned by the National Theatre in 1997 for its National Connections scheme for young people. Of all his plays, it is the one that has most in common with his startling 1995 debut, Knives in Hens. That play looked back to some elemental past: this one looks forward to a primitive future and finds a similarly stark poetry in the dialogue, at once brutalised and beautiful.
With the actors all in black, looking like a cross between the Cub Scouts and the Hitler Youth, and with a set of low metal gantries and black boxes, Lorenzo Mele's darkly lit production makes the most of limited resources and, as a result, feels a little like an episode of Blake's 7. Some of the staging is clumsy and the acting is uneven, but the music and choral singing are powerful, and the whole is atmospheric and, above all, politically relevant.
· At the Cumbernauld Theatre tomorrow. Box office: 01236 732 887. Then touring.
