Richard Bean calls Pitcairn Lord Of The Flies for grown-ups. And the playwright who penned smash-hit slapstick comedy One Man, Two Guvnors, compares the English mutineers who ditched Captain Bligh in a longboat in the South Pacific to an 18th century version of Jihadist group Isis.

“This is a chapter in English history hidden under the carpet we would all like to forget about. It’s English people behaving like Isis.”

When Captain Bligh was tasked by the Admiralty to take a cargo of breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the West Indies for planting as slave fodder, he got as far as Tofua on the return journey before the master’s mate, Fletcher Christian, mutinied with a crew of turncoats.

The sailors of the Bounty had fallen in love with Tahiti’s idyllic and fantasy-like environment in their five months preparing the plants on the island. The buck-toothed, bad-breathed drunkards could not fail with the luscious local girls who would sleep with them for a nail from the Bounty (so desperate were the islanders for iron). Christian even married a native, Maimiti.

On leaving the island, tensions were high because Bligh was a tough captain. And after considering building a raft to sail back to Tahiti – and famously replying to Bligh’s pleas for calm aboard the ship, “I am in hell, I am in hell” – Christian took the Bounty bloodlessly.

Aboard the stolen vessel, the mutineers first went to Tubuai then Tahiti, but after sticky relations with the locals eight of the men took to the seas with six Tahitian men and 12 Tahitian women as slaves.

For his third world premiere of the year, Bean has imagined what might have happened as the men aimed to create Utopia on the uninhabited and unspoiled island of Pitcairn. The action follows the first six years from January 1790. An epilogue advances the action 14 years ahead when an English ship finally arrives.

“The only modern day parallel to this is how human beings can behave if there are no rules,” explains Bean, who lived in Brighton in his early 30s during a previous life as a stand-up comedian.

“Isis is setting down rules or at least finding rules via perverted readings of the Koran.”

The mutineers went to Pitcairn to hide because they knew they would be hanged if they were caught. It was part of a complex game of hide-and-seek with the British Admiralty.

Christian, a master navigator and egalitarian, who mythmakers compare to an Enlightenment, Che Guevera-style dreamer, probably knew the Admiralty had previously misplaced Pitcairn on charts, which made the South Pacific island almost impossible to locate.

Once on Pitcairn, the men established an English system of enclosures. They divided the island into nine sections – despite having only a few pigs and goats from the ship and 26 inhabitants.

The tragedy is the men could have made Utopia but instead they made simple mistakes, believes Bean, who worked from the only accounts of the island’s early settlers – one by a murderer and the other by a Tahitian woman.

“The island is two miles by one mile, but they fenced it off. Why? The pigs could run wild because they had nowhere to go. The farming could be done communally and it’s not as if they had to feed many people.

“Yet they divided it up. I want my semi-detached house, my garden at the front, my garden at back, and if you touch my fence then you know what...”

Unsurprisingly, in-fighting soon followed the sailors’ landing on Pitcairn. A bit like in life – people began to rub each other up the wrong way.

“People rub each other wrong way or sleep with their wives, which is another thing that leads to violence – what to do with adulterers in a situation where there are no rules?”

Bean confesses he has been obsessed with the idea of Utopia since he was 11. But who hasn’t ever dreamt of an isolated idyll?

“I was at junior school and in love with Helen Gower and I used to fantasise that everyone got killed and it was just me and her on an island and she would have to fall in love with me.

“It’s a deep-seated need to escape things,” he says.

Pitcairn 
Minerva Theatre, Oaklands Park, Chichester, Friday, August 22 until Saturday, September 20