Review: Although this show's beginnings pre-date its involvement, the first appearance by the National Theatre of Scotland at the St Magnus Festival should be a major event.

Orkney Arts Theatre, Kirkwall

Although this show's beginnings pre-date its involvement (as an out-of-character Tam Dean Burn makes clear in a prologue), the first appearance by the National Theatre of Scotland at the St Magnus Festival should be a major event. And so it proves in Burn's solo tour de force as the messianic figure at the centre of Luke Sutherland's modern myth.

Hugely controversial here on Orkney because of the way it draws on his bitter memories as an adopted black lad being brought up in South Ronaldsay, Sutherland's novel has nevertheless been translated faithfully to the stage by Burn, who also becomes an emigre Czech countess, a psychopathic ned and a Romanian pimp along the way. Sutherland himself provides a fine live score, sampling his own playing on guitar and fiddle.

He wrote on the novel's publication in 2004: "Orkney might have finished me, but instead it made me," and this sometimes brutal portrayal of life on these islands, while new to this festival and a far cry from George Mackay Brown, is just as mystical in its own way. Audiences have been attentive and appreciative, rather than appalled.

But Sutherland's novel and this play are about much more than the Orkneys. A deep vein of Christian thinking runs through them, referencing William Blake's radical theology and the power of forgiveness to bring about personal redemption "no matter how s***tily people treated me". This is a parable for our times that employs real events - September 11 and the Old Compton Street bomb in April 1999 - as signposts. It speculates on how a Christ-figure's second coming might appear in these days, and how the world would treat him. It has lessons for us all - and the good folk of Orkney are smart enough to know that.