Charles Dance's island

The part of Robinson Crusoe, as scripted by the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, is no easy part for even the most responsive actor to play.

In her monologue of old age, Crusoe in England, Bishop created a  hero who is as imprisoned in the hallucinatory recollections of his 'cloud-dump' island as he ever was on the island itself.

Always a writer of distorted visions, this is her masterpiece of shifting sights, memories and dissatisfaction.

The tone is querulous: "none of the books has ever got it right", says the aged survivor who was so long lost at sea.

This Crusoe had been desperate in his vicious volcanic exile among hissing hills and turtles:  "'Pity should begin at home.' So the more / pity I felt, the more I felt at home."

He is no less trapped and desperate in his English retirement.

He had some sorts of good times on the island: "Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy."

And many sorts of bad times: "But then I'd dream of things
like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat. I'd have
nightmares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands ..."

Crusoe in England was performed at the British Library last night by Charles Dance - drily, thoughtfully, threateningly as though the audience, most of all, should never know the next act of his mind and eye. This was a cruelly lucid Crusoe, played as part of the latest Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, a project now in its fifth year of commitment to the need for poetry to be heard on stage from great actors as well as read on pages.

This was one of the most ambitious and successful proofs of that truth.