Playwright Stef Smith on adapting Amy Liptrot's novel The Outrun for the stage at EIF: 'it had to be transformed into something brand new'

Yet the acclaim that greeted The Outrun came as something of a mixed blessing to its author; for the story told in the book is almost literally of a journey to hell and back, as Amy Liptrot describes how she spent most of her twenties in London, outwardly bright, functional and enjoying life, but privately struggling with ever more disastrous levels of alcohol and drug addiction.

She returns to Orkney, where she grew up, in search of healing, although her young life there was far from easy. And now, this iconic 21st century story of loss, self-destruction, and tentative restoration through an intense reconnection with the natural world, has not only been made into a film – set to open this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival – but is about to become one of the major theatre shows of the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival, in a stage version written by leading young Scottish playwright Stef Smith, produced by Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, and directed by former National Theatre of Scotland artistic director Vicky Featherstone.

“It’s true that the book isn’t inherently dramatic,” says Smith, of Liptrot’s winding and deeply lyrical meditation on her lives in London and Orkney. “So I knew as soon as I read it – back before the pandemic – that for theatre, it would have to be transformed into something brand new.

“Amy has been incredibly generous, though, in giving us complete freedom to work with the material, so long as we stay close to the spirit of the book; and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”

What makes The Outrun such a remarkable book is the astonishing subtlety and complexity of Liptrot’s writing, and her ability to contain within it intense patterns of contradiction and contrast in her life, not only between the hugely different landscapes of Orkney and Hackney (her London home patch), but between the positive and negative aspects of both places, and between her very strong identity as a 21st century woman – never far from her vital laptop or mobile phone – and her need to return to the ancient, almost timeless stones and landscapes of her home island.

Smith has therefore worked with those tensions to create a 70-minute piece of theatre – with a cast of six, plus four singers – that uses a kind of wave structure to conjure up the patterns of attraction and repulsion that shape the life of the main character, simply called Woman.

“What Stef has done, “says Featherstone, “is to create an alternation between fairly naturalistic dialogue scenes where we see the woman in conversation with various important people in her life, and choral sequences that really capture the poetic and lyrical elements of the piece, that immersion in language and weather and emotional yearning.

“Stef is a brilliant writer,” adds Featherstone, “because she truly trusts the collaborative process involved in theatre. She creates something wonderful, but also leaves a lot of space for all the other elements of theatre; and it’s a real joy to work with that kind of writing.”

And into that space, in The Outrun project, moves an extraordinary creative team, including video designer Lewis Den Hertog – who has been in Orkney creating new visual images for the show – and Orcadian musician and composer Luke Sutherland, whose music will play a key role in the production.

“I’m drawn to any project that has a connection to Orkney, because Orkney had such an impact on me,” says Sutherland, who now lives in Perthshire, and has written and talked about his difficult childhood as the only black child in his Orkney community. “Stepping back into that – well, it’s a jolt, and not only in a pleasant way.

“So my feeling about the central character in The Outrun is that you can take the girl out of Orkney, but you can’t take Orkney out of the girl.

“The field that gives the book its title is an area of rough pasture on her father’s farm, up on a high headland, where you can always feel the sea rumbling and vibrating in all the caves and tunnels below; she says that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish that sound from the constant background traffic roar of Hackney.

“So that’s the intensity of sound I’m working with, through what will be recorded instrumental music, and live singing; and we’re developing it in rehearsal, with elements of improvisation.

“I’ve now lived in the country for a long time,” adds Sutherland, “and I do notice that my relationship with it is becoming more elemental as I get older.

“The Outrun is a story about reaching real rock bottom, and then finding a way back up; and I feel that the more secular society has become, the more we have an impulse to replace religion with other transcendental experiences; including that intense connection with nature that shapes The Outrun.”

Both Stef Smith and Vicky Featherstone agree that the huge success of The Outrun suggests that this is a lot more than a book about alcoholism and addiction, and also speaks to a much wider sense of stress and unease in modern western societies.

“I grew up in a very rural place myself,” says Smith, “in Aberfoyle in Stirlingshire; and right from the first page, I found Amy Liptrot’s story, and that journey between contrasting worlds, very familiar to me, and very moving.

“I also found it captivating and mysterious, in that it left so many parts of her life unspoken; and I’m thrilled that we’ve been given the freedom to recreate some of those unspoken aspects of the story, and to give them life.

“When it comes to the heart of the book and the soul of the memoir, though – well, I hope we’ve respected that absolutely; and that the audience will feel that spirit and soul in every performance.”

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The Outrun is at Church Hill Theatre, Edinburgh, 3-24 August, with previews 31 July-2 August. For more information, and to book tickets, visit www.eif.co.uk