Review: The Croft at Liverpool Playhouse ***

As the old saying goes – if these walls could talk.

And that’s what happens, in a manner, in Ali Milles’ The Croft where those who have lived their lives on the land leave their echoing footprints behind.

Set in a remote and sparsely populated area of the Scottish Highlands, Milles’ twisty-turny tale encompasses love, loss, fear and trauma, parental bonds, dysfunctional family relationships…and ancient myths.

The titular ‘croft’ is the long-abandoned village of Coille Ghille where an English family have transformed a simple shack into a rudimentary holiday bolthole.

It’s here, after a remarkably lengthy journey from Hertfordshire - too busy perusing the produce at Tebay services no doubt, that unlikely lovebirds Laura (Gracie Follows) and Suzanne (Caroline Harker) fetch up to spend some quality time together away from the world outside.

I say unlikely not only because the characters seem strangely mismatched – the mercurial young woman and the older, more measured, married mother (the former being the latter sons’ babysitter in a subversion of the usual Rita, Sue-style trope), but because there’s a lack of any real spark or sense of attraction between them. Certainly not enough to propel them so far out of the Home Counties.

Above: Laura (Gracie Follows) and Suzanne (Caroline Harker). Top: Eileen (also Follows) and Enid (Liza Goddard). Photos by Manuel Harlan.

As the pair seek to navigate this apparent chasm, it becomes clear there’s more amiss – and at stake – than simply disagreements over phone reception and alcohol consumption.

And we also become aware, as other stories from the distant and near-past start to emerge, that the croft has long been a place of both sanctuary and strife.

The distant past reveals a related close bond between Enid (Liza Goddard), an older woman reviled as strange and unnatural by the crofting community, and the younger Eileen (also Follows), while in the recent past Laura’s beloved mother Ruth (Harker again) makes a heartrending decision, with the support of Gray O’Brien’s ghillie David, that allows us a window into her troubled daughter’s psyche.

Above: Follows as Laura with Gray O'Brien as David in The Croft. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

These different timeframes slowly start to bleed into one another like those photographs online which morph from historic black-and-white streetscapes to modern day colour, with the cast shapeshifting from character to character as they appear and disappear on Adrian Linford’s rustic set, lit in stygian hues by Chris Davey.

Last autumn, Original Theatre it brought its ambitious and sprawling version of Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong to Williamson Square, while the company’s previous visits have included Rattigan’s Flare Path (directed by The Croft’s Alastair Whatley) and Matthew Kelly and David Yelland in Alan Bennett’s speculative Auden and Britten drama The Habit of Art.

If The Croft doesn’t quite plumb the emotional depths of Birdsong or fizz with irrepressible energy like Bennett’s arch, multi-layered drama, stick with as it unfolds to appreciate it not necessarily as a tense, jump-out-of-your-seat thriller (it’s no Woman in Black) but rather as a mediative and all-too-human ghost story.