It is "the most exciting stage transformation in the Devonshire Park Theatre's entire 122 year history", and even the real storm water which flooded the neighbouring Congress on Monday couldn't detract from Eastbourne Theatre's achievement.

For a whole month, the Devonshire Park stage will be home to four tonnes of water, not to mention real trees, turf and vegetation. And the best news is, the play's a good 'un too.

An ensemble piece here played by Peter Amory (Emmerdale), Robert Duncan (Drop the Dead Donkey), Kevin Pallister (Emmerdale) and Steven Pinder (Brookside), Neville's Island is a "comedy in thick fog" by Calendar Girls' writer Tim Firth.

Popularised in 1998 by a TV version starring Martin Clunes and Timothy Spall, it's best described as a sort of 30-something, northern Lord Of The Flies. With jokes.

Having been sent on a team-building exercise in the Lake District entitled Coping With Crisis, four middlemanagement men succeed in being the first people ever to get shipwrecked on an island on Derwentwater.

Bound in by fog, menaced by wildlife and cut off from the world, this perfunctory exercise turns into a carnival of recrimination, French cricket and re-heated sausages. And when night sets in, Neville, Gordon, Roy and Angus find themselves engaged in a muddy battle for survival.

"It's a comedy without any doubt at all," says Steven Pinder, who appeared in another production of the play at the Liverpool Playhouse earlier this summer. "But it's very easy to tap into the darker elements as all the characters become more and more stretched, and start to believe there's something else on the island which is out to get them."

Pinder plays Angus, a finicky, domesticated nerd whose elaborate survival pack includes a dinner suit and a selection of chopping boards. His companions are Neville, the happily ignorant team leader, Roy, a bornagain Christian trying to recover from a nervous breakdown, and Gordon, the bitingly sarcastic antagonist.

"They're all at different stages in their lives, but you really get under each of their skins," says Pinder. "It deals with religion, love-life insecurities, man-on-man relationships... I think it's great that Eastbourne are tackling it."