The Croft Festival Theatre Edinburgh 25th June 2025 Review
The Croft is at The Festival Theatre Edinburgh this week (Wed 25 - Sat 28 June) and if you like ghost stories, then this is probably a show for you.
It seems that you can never go wrong with a ghost story. Something deep inside of many of us, even if we will never admit it to other people, seems to have a connection, or at least a curiosity, with the paranormal. This production by Original Theatre takes all of the elements that many people associate with a ghost story and brings them all to life on stage.
This thriller/ghost story by Ali Milles takes a classic element in many ghost stories – a remote and isolated house, this time a highland croft - and gives it an interesting plot device, the concept that the land and a building can hold emotional resonances from the past, hold its own history. That history and the lives of the people who once lived in this space resonates through time to impact upon people in the present day too.
This does not however stop The Croft falling all too often into becoming a cliché of so many other ghost stories on-stage. To be fair to Ali Milles, and everyone involved in this production, to bring a thriller/ghost story to the stage is actually a very difficult thing to do well. To get that atmosphere of suspense just right is often an elusive task and along the way, tried and tested methods that audiences respond well to need to be used. All of these little shocks are used here in this show’s use of sound, lighting, the on-stage set, and of course the on-stage performances. Collectively, the team behind this show do all of this well.
The cast that includes Liza Goddard (Enid), Gracie Follows (Lauren/Eileen), Caroline Harker (Suzanne/Ruth), Gray O’Brien (David/Alec) and Simon Roberts (Tom/Patrick) brings some very experienced stage and television talents to this production and this is a vital component of this story working so well on-stage and maintaining that element of suspense throughout it. There are some very good performances by everyone here and it is unfair to single out any one person for comment. The Croft is a true collective work on-stage.
This is, however, not a perfect production and, for me, the decision to have an interval break in this show when the performance time is only some 2 hours, including that break, was not a good one. It is a difficult enough task to create the atmosphere needed for a story like this on stage, and to break that (even if it was at a point in the story that allowed for it) made little narrative sense and required that whole immersive attention of the audience in this story to be re-built again in the second half of this show.
Another problem that The Croft has is that Ali Milles has created a story here that is being told over three different time frames, and by necessity this means that many of the cast play dual roles here. If you are not watching and listening carefully, where you are in time as this story flows backwards and forwards in it, can be difficult to keep track of. The old/new story is obvious with the use of costumes, but the more contemporary/present day one is sometimes not so clear.
With “The Croft”, Ali Milles has created an interesting work, one full of obvious, not so obvious, and often very subtle layers of narrative and whilst this is what gives this work much of its substance, it also means that here, we often fall into that classic problem that any work for stage/television/film has. Here the writer does not have the luxury of writing a book (or even a short story) with its potentially unlimited pages to expand into. Here the story has to be told in a very confined time frame, and there were just so many layers to this work, so many different stories contained within it that I wanted to know more about. The time allocated to tell this story simply made this impossible. In the real world though, do any of us ever have time for all of our stories to be told?
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
It seems that you can never go wrong with a ghost story. Something deep inside of many of us, even if we will never admit it to other people, seems to have a connection, or at least a curiosity, with the paranormal. This production by Original Theatre takes all of the elements that many people associate with a ghost story and brings them all to life on stage.
This thriller/ghost story by Ali Milles takes a classic element in many ghost stories – a remote and isolated house, this time a highland croft - and gives it an interesting plot device, the concept that the land and a building can hold emotional resonances from the past, hold its own history. That history and the lives of the people who once lived in this space resonates through time to impact upon people in the present day too.
This does not however stop The Croft falling all too often into becoming a cliché of so many other ghost stories on-stage. To be fair to Ali Milles, and everyone involved in this production, to bring a thriller/ghost story to the stage is actually a very difficult thing to do well. To get that atmosphere of suspense just right is often an elusive task and along the way, tried and tested methods that audiences respond well to need to be used. All of these little shocks are used here in this show’s use of sound, lighting, the on-stage set, and of course the on-stage performances. Collectively, the team behind this show do all of this well.
The cast that includes Liza Goddard (Enid), Gracie Follows (Lauren/Eileen), Caroline Harker (Suzanne/Ruth), Gray O’Brien (David/Alec) and Simon Roberts (Tom/Patrick) brings some very experienced stage and television talents to this production and this is a vital component of this story working so well on-stage and maintaining that element of suspense throughout it. There are some very good performances by everyone here and it is unfair to single out any one person for comment. The Croft is a true collective work on-stage.
This is, however, not a perfect production and, for me, the decision to have an interval break in this show when the performance time is only some 2 hours, including that break, was not a good one. It is a difficult enough task to create the atmosphere needed for a story like this on stage, and to break that (even if it was at a point in the story that allowed for it) made little narrative sense and required that whole immersive attention of the audience in this story to be re-built again in the second half of this show.
Another problem that The Croft has is that Ali Milles has created a story here that is being told over three different time frames, and by necessity this means that many of the cast play dual roles here. If you are not watching and listening carefully, where you are in time as this story flows backwards and forwards in it, can be difficult to keep track of. The old/new story is obvious with the use of costumes, but the more contemporary/present day one is sometimes not so clear.
With “The Croft”, Ali Milles has created an interesting work, one full of obvious, not so obvious, and often very subtle layers of narrative and whilst this is what gives this work much of its substance, it also means that here, we often fall into that classic problem that any work for stage/television/film has. Here the writer does not have the luxury of writing a book (or even a short story) with its potentially unlimited pages to expand into. Here the story has to be told in a very confined time frame, and there were just so many layers to this work, so many different stories contained within it that I wanted to know more about. The time allocated to tell this story simply made this impossible. In the real world though, do any of us ever have time for all of our stories to be told?
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com