It is 1995. Annie and her siblings, Preeny, Sam and Brawn, are holidaying on the Isle of Skye when they glimpse their father walking across the beach. The problem is he died in a car crash four years earlier.
What follows is a relentless search for the truth on a rugged island where grief, memory, and the supernatural blur together.
The play’s promise of a “chilling, propulsive debut thriller” is certainly there in the setup. The frame is neat too: Annie, now middle-aged, recounts her story for a ghost story podcast, filmed close-up while James Robinson moves from interviewer to inhabit other roles from Annie’s past.
Ellie Keel’s writing is deliberately slippery, part ghost story, part domestic tragedy. There are moments of genre flair – a driverless silver car, a drunken mother staggering through the cottage, a sheep crashing out of the dark – but the play mostly inhabits the psychological terrain of loss. It is bleak, a Skye of black sand and shadows rather than bright summer skies. The island itself is evoked in fragments – haze, howling wind and lyrical language gesture towards the mountains and lochs – though the staging rarely gives us the raw physicality of Skye as a place.
The set is spare: a black box, black costumes, a table of sand, a child's ball and bucket for fun games on the beach. With the occasional use of live-feed video, Matthew Iliffe’s direction keeps things fluid, but there is a sense that some design choices, including the camera work, are underused. The fact there is a large screen dominating the stage is a missed opportunity to illustrate a cinematic Skye seascape - akin to Orkney as a key character in the film, ‘The Outrun.’
The heavy lifting in the show is done by the actors. Dawn Steele delivers a magnetic Annie, balancing narrator and participant with precision. Robinson’s portrayal of Brawn is volatile and unsettling, his doubling into other roles both a strength but such as a jarring Glasgwegian accent for a Hebridean islander, a source of occasional confusion.
As a thriller the piece is gripping in its buildup but, after spending time drawing you into its puzzle like a murder mystery, it falters at its close and loses the plot. For some, this subversion will feel bold, for others, a frustrating anticlimax.
What remains is a polished debut production, haunted less by ghosts than by memory. There is intelligence in Keel’s writing with moments of poetic nuance, yet uneven in the way the direction translates emotion and atmosphere theatrically.
An eerie supernatural tale which intrigues yet leaves the island – and the audience –enveloped in a chill of unresolved gloom.
Show Times:
31 July to 25 August 2025 @ 1500
Tickets: £22 (£20).
Suitability: 14+
https://tickets.summerhallarts.co.uk/event/981:329/981:8466/