Amy Liptrot’s memoir is having a moment. Nora Fingscheidt’s screen version starring Saoirse Ronan is about to open in the Edinburgh international film festival and, here, running for the full length of the Edinburgh international festival, is Stef Smith’s adaptation for the theatre.
The book, though, is an odd choice for the stage. On the one hand, it is easy to see the appeal to Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum, the co-producer: The Outrun is a popular title that offers a vivid modern-day portrait of Orcadian life. But on the other, it is hard to imagine how an introspective piece of writing that makes no claim to the dramatic could work theatrically.
Liptrot’s journey from Orkney to Hackney and back to Orkney again is defined not by external factors but by her inner conflict as an alcoholic. For all her destructive behaviour, we learn next to nothing about the boyfriend who was forced to reject her or the friends she lost along the way. That is not the book’s concern; rather, it is with Liptrot herself and her slow, personal route to sobriety.
In the lead role, Isis Hainsworth is consequently never off the stage. She encounters a litany of characters but engages with them only superficially before moving on. Her fallout with her boyfriend (Seamus Dillane) is thinly sketched enough to be from a soap opera. Hers is a fine, nuanced performance, capturing Liptrot’s swings from hedonism to despair without self pity, but the script offers little reason to care whether she gets clean or not.
In what feels like a one-woman show for 10 actors, director Vicky Featherstone compensates by throwing everything at the production. Between composer Luke Sutherland and choral arranger Michael Henry, the music ranges from techno to evensong, at once abrasive and haunting. Lewis den Hertog dominates the walls of Milla Clarke’s set with video images of rock formations and abstracted cityscapes, blurring the wild and the urban. And movement director Vicki Manderson keeps the chorus tight, as if they are carrying Hainsworth though the show.
It is all very impressive and yet also, in the absence of Liptrot’s sense of psychogeography, a distraction from this story’s lack of dramatic movement.
• At the Church Hill theatre, Edinburgh, until 24 August
• All our Edinburgh festival reviews
