PARADISE found, paradise lost. Ever since Mankind so memorably screwed up in the Garden of Eden, the story’s been the same… we seem incapable of recognising the essential simplicity of happiness.

This is very much the thematic thread that runs through this gripping piece of theatre by Richard Bean, who gives a Lord of the Flies treatment to the story of what happened to the mutineers after their revolt in 1789 against that man we love to hate, the eternal nautical bogeyman Captain William Bligh.

It’s said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and so it is with this motley crew, bubbling with petty resentments and jealousies rather like the magma rumbling below the surface of the volcanic isle that is their new home.

Home? No, that’s the last thing it is, for Pitcairn is actually just another prison for the seafarers. These scurvy knaves have merely swapped the wooden walls of His Majesty’s armed vessel Bounty for the grey stone ramparts of a God-forsaken chunk of rock in the South Seas.

So. The tyrannical Bligh has been dispensed with and now Fletcher Christian (Tom Morley) has a free hand in making his Utopian dream become a reality in the land where the women’s sexual favours are as endlessly abundant as the fruit in the trees.

The trouble is that our Jack Tars are not so jolly once they realise that they may have set Bligh adrift but their English hang-ups are not so easily cast away.

Free love’s fine when it suits you, but what happens when your partner also adopts a decidedly freelance approach to all things conjugal?

Morley makes for a thoroughly convincing Christian, becoming evermore desperate as the crew rebel against him just as they did with the hated Captain Bligh.

He makes a brilliant study of a faltering leader manipulated by weaker, more stupid men, such as the oafish and opportunistic Quintal. Samuel Edward-Cook is worryingly perfect as the upstart who respects no one and is as much to blame for the looming disaster as anyone.

For if ever a man deserved the bosun’s lash or the noose rather than the warm embrace of these new surroundings, then it is the repugnant Quintal, who shamelessly turns on the very man who has given him the chance of earthly redemption.

Mutineer John Adams (Adam Newington) is the eternal dupe, caught between his loyalty to Christian, fear of the bullying Quintal, and the ever-present threat of a British man o’ war’s sails one day appearing on the horizon.

Pitcairn is an absorbing study of the eternal human tendency to destroy everything of beauty given half the chance, a depressing fact, but based on the evidence of this sterling production, manifestly true.

It runs at Malvern Theatres until Saturday (November 22).