THE CROFT AT THE ARTS THEATRE

Caroline Harker as Suzanne and Lucy Doyle as Laura

 As the curtain opens, a crashing wave threatens to engulf the front stalls. The sound, directed by a masterful audio engineer Max Pappenheim,  takes us to the beach on the Applecross Peninsula in the west Highlands of Scotland – the Atlantic booms and dolphins swim past.  It is a bleak but beautiful spot and there, in a remote cottage, once a crofter’s home, the story unfolds.

Foreboding begins with a woman alone on the stage . Only present for a few seconds, Gwen Taylor is Enid, a persecuted outcast from the days of the Highland clearance. Ravaged and ragged she stands mid stage and cries “Let them come”.

And come they do. Cut to 2020 . Laura (a teenage ingénue role from newcomer Lucy Doyle) and her  nervous older companion Suzanne played with welcome nuance by Caroline Harker. After about a dozen allusions to ‘ a romantic time,’ ‘ away on their own,at last’ plus lots of kissing – we know they are lovers. Yet they have travelled for sixteen hours from Letchworth  and Suzanne is missing her teenage sons  and semi -estranged  ( I wonder why?) husband. Laura was in fact the family babysitter . But just as they settle into the ‘ blissful weekend ‘ the local Gillie , David ( a gruff reassuring , well drawn presence from Drew Cain) interrupts them on the floor in the midst of an energetic frolic. David ,a devotee of ‘the old ways’ accepts a whiskey and begins to reveal the parallel story in the play; Enid (the wild woman we glimpsed) and her young friend Eilene – daughter of the pastor- vanished in some horrible way in 1870 when Eilene had fled her father’s house pregnant.

So that’s the set up. All the characters are shadowed by their historical equivalents except the Caroline Harker lover Suzanne who plays Laura’s lost mother tragically dead from cancer these five years. Still with it? A dwindling number of the audience were, if the protests in the interval were any judge. And yet there was a lot to enjoy. Enid was chilling every time she appeared,  visible in the tradition of spirits, to some but not all the visitors. There was one  almost comical moment when Enid peered through the window at the increasingly fractious couple , but generally the feeling of dread builds satisfyingly. ( more credits to Mr.Pappenheim, the haunting noises come as regular shocks to the system)

Yet there was so much wrong with the story. No wonder relations between the insolent young Laura and the older Suzanne, anxious about her lads left back home, got worse and worse. Despite stimulating swims in the ocean ( very creditable) the spectre of Laura’s sad lost mother ( who was having an affair with David the Gillie it turns out,) gets in the way . And a hidden letter found and read by Suzanne provokes Laura ( on a walkie talkie outside the cottage now ) into a towering rage. You shouldn’t read other people’s correspondence but in the circcumstances there’s no sense in flying off the handle . The letter reveals the truth about her mother’s death and try as Suzanne does to gently take Laura through it, it only makes her more furious.

Caroline Harker appears as the lovely tragic mother in interleaving scenes with her lover Gillie David. The parallel between her and Suzanne could not be clearer but there is real clarity and grace in this portrayal of a brave dying woman - even though it serves to further complicate the plot. Where is Laura her daughter in all this? Or the husband who owns the cottage?

So back to 1870 where Laura now Eilene ( so much nicer than cheeky rude modern Laura ) lives with the alarming Enid. Eilene must have been truly desperate as Enid is sometimes a caring seer who castigates Alec the man who got her pregnant ( played again by Drew Cain) but then turns just about as nasty as any witch can, with catastrophic results. The resulting scenes are gruesome.

The Orignal Theatre Company is a tremendously good troupe. Their Caroline’s Kitchen was a hilarious tour de force here in Cambridge and they have talent to burn. But this debut play from Ali Milles ‘livng and working in Suffolk’ is all we’re told about her is just too confusing to ultimately succceed She ‘explains’ same sex love between women as a distortion of the mother daughter relationship -  (a tricky interpretation to say the least) and if you don’t buy that theory, she falls back on the tried and tested  ‘men are to blame for all the ills everywhere’. There’s a Me-Too Celtic- style core at the centre of the action..  In a series of speeches, an unforgiving  Laura blames the men in the play for evertyhing that goes appallingly wrong, quite reasonably in the dire days of the Highland Clearances, but it is a bit of a stretch when she accuses her own modern father ( he’s a clergyman too skilfully played by Simon Roberts. the flinty pastor father of Eilene back in the day) of killing her mother with the words “ everyone knows cancer is caused by stress’ ( no it isn’t)  and oppressing her with his religious views. Really unfair as apart from a few mentions of the Bible, Tom is the over- compliant,  nervous –Nellie, Church of England vicar of central casting.

If anyone has made it through this review this far,, they will have an idea of the demands of Milles’ play on the brilliant cast on the shores of the North Atlantic But the astonishing fact is these great actors do create a thriller that despite its strange angles odd preoccupations and confusion keeps the audience engaged to the last .