Diary of a Shopkeeper, 11th August 2024

This diary was first published in The Orcadian on August 15th, the day of the UK film premiere of The Outrun. Amy Liptrot’s memoir of growing up in the West Mainland, descending into alcoholic hell in London, and slowly recovering back in Orkney, was a bestseller when published in 2016. Its story has struck a chord around the world, and the movie adaptation, starring Saoirse Ronan and featuring lots of local faces, is sure to spread its fame further.

But there’s more than one way to turn words on a page into an enthralling dramatic experience. I had to go to Edinburgh for work last week and was delighted to find a stage adaptation of The Outrun running as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. From my seat near the back of the long, barrel-ceilinged Churchill Theatre in douce Morningside, some of the details of the stage set were indistinct. Even so, I could immediately recognise a life-size wooden birdwatching hut, complete with the shelf below the window for binocular elbows. There were rounded mounds of dusky sand scattered across the stage, which most folk probably thought were dunes on an Orkney beach. They might have been that, but they were also beautifully sculpted miniatures of the hills of Hoy, such as they might appear if you saw them when flying in from south.

Which is, of course, how The Outrun begins, with newborn Amy arriving from hospital in Aberdeen, just as her sick and sedated father is about to depart in the opposite direction. One of the most powerful and poignant opening scenes in literature, it appears at the start of the stage adaptation too. Key moments from the book punctuate the 90 minutes of Stef Smith’s script: the description of the sea caves under the Outrun field; the party lifestyle in London, spiralling out of control; the assault at the hands of a stranger while recklessly drunk; the pursuit, back in Orkney, of the elusive corncrake; and finally the discovery of some kind of inner peace on Papay.

All these iconic moments are present and correct. But the play is far from a pedestrian transposition from page to stage. In some ways it’s more like a dramatic poem than a play. Yes, there’s emotion and there’s drama, but both of those elements swell and subside in a slow rhythm, like waves on an Atlantic beach, rather than unfolding in a tightly-structured plot. The six speaking parts – with Isis Hainsworth giving a passionate performance as the central character – are complemented by a chorus of four other actors, who echo and emphasise the drama of each moment in movement and song. The music provided a further Orkney connection, as it was composed and recorded by Luke Sutherland, who grew up in St Magaret’s Hope. Sutherland’s own account of an Orkney  childhood followed by a plunge into a crazy London life, Venus as a Boy, was published 20 years ago. It would be great to see another novel from him, but meanwhile his soundtrack to The Outrun, modulating from ethereal ambient island sounds to banging electronic dance tracks, was highly effective.

The central character’s father asks her at one point, ‘Do you think they’ll ever run out of things to write about Orkney? It all tends to be a bit misty-eyed and romantic. There’s not much written about the sheep shit and storms.’ This play avoids the tired cliches of island life in both its writing and presentation and is all the better for it. Instead of picturesque scenic backdrops, for instance, there are moving video projections of evocative semi-abstract imagery. It seems to all have been filmed here: sandstone cliff laminations, bladderwrack swaying in a rockpool, bubbles roiling in a glass of Dark Island beer. The whole show has been expertly woven together by director Vicky Featherstone, who was last seen in Orkney a decade or more ago, when she directed a play written by a local shopkeeper for the National Theatre of Scotland: Long Gone Lonesome – The Thomas Fraser Story.

Is this the definitive stage version of The Outrun? Probably not. The book is so rich and packed with emotion and incident that it could be adapted in many ways. We’ll see another approach when the film comes out. But the Festival’s reimagining, in a co-production with the Edinburgh Lyceum, is highly imaginative and highly successful. I wish it could tour and be part of our own summer festival. Till then, catch it if you can in Edinburgh or London. I give it five stars.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 15th August 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.