Anna Burnside reviews a tense production with ‘an impressive’ central performance.
The boys are in bed and historian Anna is slumped at the kitchen table, feeling for a large glass of red among the chaos of work-life detritus. A projected backdrop of deserted island landscapes underlines that she is pretty much alone with two wee weans and a shonky internet connection in a very remote part of the world.
Then the younger one wakes up and demands the Gruffalo.
All this is hellish enough. Then, when digging a hole in the garden, Anna and the older lad discover the skeleton of a baby, wrapped in a blanket.
This adaptation of Sarah Moss’s novel, set on the made-up island of Colsay, has a lot going on, and only Nicola Jo Cully to deliver it all. As well as exasperated, sleep-deprived Anna, she is both wee boys, her puffin-obsessed, permahorny husband and the suspicious island polis investigating the dead infant.
Shireen Mula’s script jerks backwards and forwards, mimicking the attention span of those who are up five times a night with a shouty toddler. It’s all there: the loss of perspective, the balancing act between love and loss of self-control, the rage at a partner who is more interested in the bird population than his own family.
Director Rebecca Atkinson-Lord keeps the strings pulled tight, and designer Hugo Dodsworth’s two-screen projections cleverly flag up the character and scene changes.
It all stands and falls on Cully, and she does an impressive job, jumping from squalling tot to judgemental officer to braying husband in the flash of a slide. At the end, when successful academic Anna emerges from the dressing gown, the applause is for the character making it through as much as for her performance.
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Night Waking is on tour until October 31, 2025. For further details, go to the production company’s website.
Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.
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