Theatre belongs in the great outdoors ... Nether Largie Cairn in Scotland. Photograph: Alan McAteer
Half Life is the latest piece of landscape drama to be conjured up by the Glasgow-based environmental organisation NVA. Designed to encourage us to re-connect with our ancestors' attitude to death, it is set physically in the prehistorically pregnant Kilmartin area of Argyll and, chronologically, somewhere between the Bronze Age and the iPod age. I would settle, to judge by the clothes worn by its protagonist, archaeologist professor Jacob Wheeler, on the Late Oxfam period.
Jacob, a harmless soul, is pottering around some stones when his grown-up daughter Tessa disappears, Now this is clearly not his fault, but his wife, instead of calling the police, blames Jacob. Maybe she is enraged by his wardrobe, or maybe it is just because she is a lawyer and constitutionally in need of victims. It then dawns on the audience that we are not talking abduction but spiritual time travel. Jacob is an expert in what he terms "the grammar of the rocks". Tessa has slipped through what we must call a split infinitive into the Underworld whose existence Modern Man sadly overlooks.
You may or may not buy this thesis. What you should buy are tickets for trains, planes and coracles and make your way to Kilmartin before Half Life ends on September 16. The show, presented in collaboration with National Theatre of Scotland, is confirmation of my theory that the most satisfying dramatic experiences are usually those staged beyond the insulating confines of a building. Partly it is the audacity of what you can present. In Lancaster I once saw a production of Treasure Island in which cannonballs were hurled from behind real azalea bushes at real water on which bobbed a real, albeit half-scale, Hispaniola. In an al fresco version of Hamlet, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the Lapp Players arrived by real reindeer sled.
NVA and its creative director Angus Farquhar take things one rung higher. Half Life is the first fee-paying spectacle I have attended which requires a degree in map-reading, or at least a stout pair of Vibram soles and a goodly supply of energy bars. Clutching copies of professor Wheeler's field notes, the audience fans over an artistically manipulated Bronze Age landscape by day before reconvening at night before a giant floodlit pine shuttlecock populated by the hapless Wheeler and gravity-defying Underworlders.
Goodness knows what it took to co-ordinate all this, but the programme lists 29 institutional supporters. What makes it all work, though, is not the scale, but the simplicity. Surrounded by mud and forest scents and carved rock, we are back in the world of fears and ritual: the very roots of theatre.
