With a shimmering vision of endless sky, we are taken across the Pentland Firth to the archipelago of Orkney, a place of unspoilt wildness nearer the Arctic circle than London. This is where a young girl is brought up by a bi-polar father and evangelical Christian mother, on their sheep farm ‘on a stretch of coastland pummelled by the wind and sea spray year-round.’
Based on Any Liptrot’s best-selling memoir The Outrun, the play is an emotional rollercoaster of a ride, dramatising her brutally honest experience of addiction and fight for recovery and renewal, characterising her on-stage as The Woman, played by Isis Hainsworth, co-produced by Edinburgh International Festival and Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh.
Energetically running across the stage, here is a happy-go-lucky teenager, embracing the outdoor life, ancient legends and standing stones with gleeful romanticism, ‘my body is made of ocean and earth’.
Foregoing deep Orcadian roots, she escapes to Edinburgh University for her first taste of freedom, then bored with a dead-end job, sets off by ferry and train to London. ‘Why come here?’ a young man asks her in a bar, ‘I want to be a writer, I want to experience everything,’ she replies, throwing herself into a carefree, hedonistic ritual of drink, drugs and dance of self-destruction.
The setting depicts a sandy beach beside a large pinewood cabin which, like a spinning TARDIS, transforms through time, from island bothy to city flat, against a shifting video backdrop of a rocky landscape. Through short snapshot scenes, the narrative is played out with a few characters, her father, island friends, a love affair and Rehab therapy sessions. Seamus Dillane as The Boy charmingly captures his initial tentative shyness as well as frantic despair at her addiction, ‘Drinking is destroying you.’ he pleads, but she is in denial: ‘I shall cut down if it’s a problem.’
Intermittently, like a Greek tragedy, a chorus gathers in the shadows, like the Standing Stones of Stenness, a collective voice through song, recitation and repetition, echoing her thoughts, memories, long lost dreams. To illustrate the inner voice of Liptrot’s Memoir, we hear her intimate feelings of despair, but also of hope, ‘I am a girl from an island, a misfit… scrubbed clean like a pebble.’
It is her memory of spring-time lambs which entices her home, following a most poignant telephone call with her father – a gentle, quiet performance by Paul Brennan, sharing his own sense of loneliness – and she realises the rhythm of seasons and sea is central to her being, her soul.
‘I grew up in the sky, with an immense sense of space. When I blink the sun flickers, my breath pushes the clouds across the sky and the waves roll into the shore in time with my beating heart.’ – Amy Liptrot, The Outrun: A Memoir
Flickering Northern Lights, the Merrie Dancers of winter, flow at times across the backdrop, but there’s a perpetual gloomy darkness with no sound of crashing waves or cry of seabirds; a claustrophobic mood too, with the cabin dominating – a scene lacking atmospheric realism.
Hainsworth portrays The Woman with tangible, tearful, emotional insight, shifting from youthful exuberance to bleak despair through a painfully raw rite of passage. She escaped Orkney to seek a new life, but, like a migrating bird, returns home to find her true self and a magical sense of peace, spotting the corncrakes along the seashore.
With thanks to Vivien Devlin for this review.
