Churchill Theatre
Five stars
When the young woman at the centre of Stef Smith’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s unflinching tale of addiction and redemption declares how she wants to experience everything, her mantra sums up an entire millennial generation’s struggle for pleasure. The agony and ecstasy that follows in Vicky Featherstone’s devastating production that forms the flagship of Edinburgh International Festival’s drama programme roars with that same sense of yearning.
It begins and ends on Orkney, where the woman was born and grew up, before escaping to the mainland and a big city full of possibilities. The hedonism that initially fires this the woman almost destroys her before she returns to her roots to find unexpected sanctuary in a different kind of wildlife.
Eight years on from the 2016 publication of Liptrot’s memoir laid bare her story, Smith, Featherstone and their brilliant company of six actors and a five strong choir have transformed it into a delirious spectacle that at points is more cantata than straightforward play.
Composer Luke Sutherland and musical director and choral arranger Michael Henry tap in to the repetitions of Smith’s text as the Woman wrestles with her own psyche as she scrambles across the landscape of Milla Clarke’s shack based set to make something dizzyingly euphoric. This is lifted into the stratosphere even more by Lewis den Hertog’s blissed out video design.
This forms the kaleidoscopic backdrop to the Woman’s various interactions, from her psychologically wounded farmer Dad played by Paul Brennan, to her doomed London relationship with Seamus Dillane’s Boy, to Reuben Joseph’s kindred spirit Scientist.
At the production’s heart, however, is Isis Hainsworth, who embodies the Woman with a fearless mix of strength and vulnerability. As the Woman navigates her way through all the terrors that make her who she is, this makes for a liberating hymn to life’s rich tapestry. and all that batters us along the way as we come blinking into the light wanting more.
The Herald, August 5th 2024
ends
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