One of the best plays I saw at the 2019 Fringe was Stef Smith’s Enough at the Traverse theatre. Two flight attendants, Jane and Tori, have neatly manicured lives that slowly unravel and abruptly plummet in this poetic and surprising Fringe First award-winning play. When I saw the Edinburgh International Festival program, this was the first play that I booked and was one of my most anticipated plays of August.
The Outrun is the staged adaptation of the novel (also called The Outrun) by Amy Liptrot, whose memoir recounts her damaging and addictive relationship to alcohol. Liptrot’s debut was celebrated for her searing honesty, winning the 2016 Wainwright Award and the 017 PEN Ackerley Prize. It’s currently having a resurgence with both Smith’s staged adaptation and a film set to be released later this year starring Saorise Ronan, written by Nora Fingscheidt and Liptrot. The book is deeply self-reflective as Liptrot recounts how, over the course of 10 years in London, friends and boyfriends abandon her as alcohol slowly erodes her selfhood. Liptrot returns to the Orkney Islands and lands herself working for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The combination of descriptions of the vast, Scottish landscape, its nature and wildlife, and the memories of the frantic, wild nights of London create a masterful work of literature. The mountain for Smith to climb as a playwright when dramatising this book, was externalising Liptrot’s experience and reflections into a dramatic work.
There are moments in the text where Smith’s lyricism is spellbinding. But unfortunately, the play never quite finds its footing. There are lulls in the dramatic action that left me cold and wanting. And despite the magnetizing performance by Isis Hainsworth, it couldn’t save the sometimes-lagging pace of the play. Hainsworth’s character, the lead and playing a version of Liptrot, is also the only character that feels fully realized, whilst the other characters she encounters feel like afterthoughts. The chorus that made up the soundscape of the piece sounded beautiful but added little to the dramatic action of the play and at some points, slowed the production down to a tedious pace. The set was gorgeous, perfectly depicting the rocky terrain Northern Scotland is famous for, but just like the play, it left me feeling hollow and cold. It was overall a disappointing experience, but I still believe Smith to be one of the best playwrights Scotland has to offer and that was evident in some of the more memorable imagistic language of the play, beautifully detailing both the inner turmoil of Hainsworth and the epic landscape of the outrun.
The Outrun is on in EIFF’s Churchill Theatre at 20:00 until 24 August
Buy tickets here.
Image provided via EIFF press release