Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir about returning to her home in the Scottish islands of Orkney and facing up to her alcoholism quickly became a keystone of contemporary nature writing. Liptrot’s lyrical prose reflects the Orkney landscape: harshness and beauty butting up against each other. You can feel the sea seeping through the pages, the constant gales, the tension between violence and stillness, between an ancient land and a contemporary woman.What is surprising, then, about this stage adaptation at the Church Hill Theatre by the excellent Scottish playwright Stef Smith, part of the Edinburgh International Festival, is nature’s absence. Instead, we get digital backdrops with swirling, inky-black pictures, hard-edged sets, artificial boulders. This isn’t the natural world, it’s a made one.Smith has pared the book back to make this a story not of nature and addiction, but simply of addiction. We’re not really in Orkney, we’re in the head of Woman, who tells us her story from birth to rebirth. It is theatrically simple, and there is an admirable clarity to Smith’s script. Where the book is told in flashback, jolting backwards to the things that brought her back to Orkney, Smith’s adaptation is all linear.There is clarity, too, in the direction by Vicky Featherstone, formerly artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London. Scenes where Woman drinks and parties alternate with moments of great stillness as she sits talking to her dad or meets a new lover.It is a solid production, a handsome one, but one with no great surprises — and being inside Woman’s head begins to grate. It is bleak and barren in there, and that is reflected in the staging. Lighting by Lizzie Powell intensifies and fills with colour in a couple of moments — a rave, the Northern Lights — but otherwise remains grey and cold. The dourness of the production begins to weigh heavy.Thank goodness, then, for Isis Hainsworth as Woman. She is the extraordinary thing in a production that is mostly safe and ordinary. One moment she fizzes with alcohol-fuelled elation, all smiles and wide eyes, then a second later she is slumped in an unshakeable catatonia. She pulls us into her headlong dissolution. Her expressions, her body language contain worlds; the play wheels around her, it lives entirely on her mercurial performance, peaking and troughing many times a minute.Joining Hainsworth intermittently is an nine-strong ensemble who snatch up some of her lines and sing them in mournful chorus (lovely compositions by Orcadian musician Luke Sutherland). Members of this ensemble take other roles as necessary: the dad, the lover, the friend.Unlike the film adaptation starring Saoirse Ronan, which opens the Edinburgh International Film Festival at almost exactly the same time and plays with form, this stage version makes a virtue of simplicity. Smith has picked out the book’s strongest strand, that story of addiction and recovery, and snipped everything else away; it is a clarification, but it is also a diminution.Looking at that bleak box, the contents of Amy’s head, there is a nagging sense that the imaginative space of a theatre could have been the perfect place to summon Hackney, Orkney and everything in between. Instead, too often, it all fades to grey.★★★☆☆To August 24, eif.co.uk
