SEVEN years. That’s the time it’s taken for Eilidh Loan to write her theatre play Moorcroft, and it’s almost fair to say the opening last night created a greater frisson than Virginia Giuffre’s pay-off. (Sorry, agreed settlement from Prince Andrew.)
Why has Loan’s work picked up so much traction in theatre circles? Lots of reasons. The play was first brought to the attention of the Tron Theatre producer/director Andy Arnold when Loan appeared one day as part of Arnold’s clever lockdown initiative to give auditions to those who had never appeared in the theatre before.
Loan read a monologue, she was asked where it was from and said it was from her own play, Moorcroft. The theatre producer was blown away when he read the whole script.
That brings us to the second reason why the theatre world has been looking at Eilidh Loan in the way Nadine Dorries looks at Boris Johnson. Writers/producers/critics/theatre regulars appreciate that the writing of the play took seven years, not because Loan writes at a very slow speed, but because that’s the time it took to get inside her dad’s head.
When Loan was an acting student at Guildford, her dad would drive her down, and they’d spend endless hours in the car chatting. He opened up about the football team he played with as a young man. But more importantly, he opened up about the tragedies he witnessed in his football club. Garry Loan talked about the resultant depression, growing older, and coming to terms with a life he had never imagined for himself as a young man.
Eilidh Loan then came to talk about her own mental health issues. The anxieties she felt as a young actor in training. The imposter syndrome. The inability to believe she had had the range of life experience required to help an audience believe in the characters she was playing.
Ironically, Loan revealed herself to be an immense performer, winning major drama school prizes and later going on to win roars of approval for her work as Mary Shelley in Rona Munro’s Frankenstein production.
But back to the opening night. Would the 24-year-old from Erskine be able to synthesise the darkness of depression with the studs-down-the-shin-tough world of amateur football – in which men were more likely to admit to having stolen lead off the church roof than open up about their mental health problems?
Well, go see for yourself. But what emerges from Loan’s efforts is there has been some good to come of the Covid experience. We’ve learned that the world is full of people with compassion and concern for others. We’ve also learned of the Novak Djokovic's who put personal preference ahead of the common good. But we now know that mental health can now be talked about in a previously unimagined way.
Yet, there’s another reason why Loan’s play was so enticing. The Ralgex-spraying, testosterone-fuelled, brutally critical world of amateur football is pumped hard with the air of dark comedy. Making this play unmissable.
Moorcroft, The Tron Theatre until March 5.
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