Skye: A Thriller at Summerhall – Edinburgh Fringe review

Ellie Keel is one of those people whom it is exhausting simply to think about.  She founded the Women’s Prize for Playwriting. She is a successful theatrical producer with two shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. She’s a novelist. And now she’s a playwright too.

Skye: A Thriller tells a complicated, darkly absorbing story of mystery and loss. It begins with Annie sitting down with a TV producer (James Robinson) to make a documentary about something that happened 30 years ago when she was 17.  Her twin sister Preeny, her brother Brawn and eight-year-old Sammy were at their holiday cottage on Skye with their severely alcoholic mother when they see a figure on the beach.

In the distance, he looks like their father. “Tall, so tall you’d notice.”  Only he can’t be. Because their father died in a car accident four years before.

From this beginning, Keel weaves a twisting tale of strange events and coincidences. Annie (played with coiled tension by Dawn Steele) keeps going back over the details, anxious to make sure that her questioner understands that this is not simply a narrative about “four kids gullible enough to think their dad had come back from the dead.”

He begins to join in the action, taking the form of Brawn, surly and anxious to fulfil his role as man in this dysfunctional family. Both slip in and out of other roles: self-obsessed Preeny, and little Sammy, obsessed with Fred the Ferrari, his red toy car.

Director Matthew Iliffe keeps the tension taut, making full use of a vivid soundscape by Hattie North and Rūta Irbīte’s simply effective set of a table covered with black sand, on which lies a bright red ball and bucket. The projections of Annie’s face as she struggles to remember are sparingly and effectively used.

Oddly for a show on the Edinburgh Fringe, Skye could do with being a little longer.  It is a ghost story, but the hauntings conjured are emotional as much as supernatural. Its strength springs from the picture of a family it builds, the way that the disappointments and dysfunction of adults leave indelible scars on their offspring.

Those tangled relationships –  what makes Brawn so angry and Annie so cautious – could do with being examined a little more. When you have become invested in people conjured so vividly, the ending feels too abrupt.

Skye is so beautifully written, each word carrying weight and impact, and so convincingly acted by Steele and Robinson, that it holds and demands attention. You just want more.