Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Liza Goddard, Gracie Fellows, Caroline Harker, Gray O’ Brien, Simon Roberts, Russell Layton, Judith Rae, Rheanna Trueman.
Life is an echo of what was once a story, memories, ghosts, remnants of where tales go when they need to be resurrected to make the living think, to give them reason to understand the effects of the past on the present.
To be cut off from civilisation is akin to be forsaken by Time, everything moves at a different pace, the void between reality and what we perceive as apparitions, ghosts, visitations, is such that those echoes reflect our sense of space when there is little or no company to ward off the meaningless and the agony of our mind at work.
It is to the thriller by Ali Miles, The Croft, that such solitude and memory act as a catalyst of fear, and the expression of intense emotional outpourings of love and regret that lay a foundation of dramatic consequences across the centuries.
Laura has taken her lover Suzanne to an old crofting house in a desolate, almost deserted coastal part of the Highlands, all that she lived through with her father and mother, the latter’s passing from cancer adding to the response and the turmoiled soul adding to the tension that brings out the echo of another stripped of her dignity and treated as different, and by allowing this sense of depth and merging of times to seek a kind of interaction, a ground where time’s allusion is not separated by the moment of understanding that is breached as one woman suffers at the hands of the clearances, and the other for her sexuality.
Whilst the play was brave, touching, and affecting in its dealing with a couple of issues that still stir passions of those whose families were affected at the time, especially the way that the clearances destroyed lives just for-profit sake, it lacked a kind of urgency, of arousing detail that in its lost wake became impassive, and with little to add as the pressure valve of sensitivity increased.
It is though to the relationship between Laura and Suzanne that the play has its finest moments, the communication and almost hesitant contact between their characters as their lives become upended is a source of honest performance, and for Gracie Fellows and Caroline Harker the applause and praise should be bountiful and true.
The Croft has the imagination and the passion behind its exploration of time and relationships, of love between two sets of women and the fallout of how they are judged in a way by the men on the periphery, the motivations of property and religious dogma affecting their outcomes centuries apart but occupying the same tight, withdrawn space.
A thought-provoking play, one which plays with the narrative of Time in a persuading way.
Ian D. Hall