It starts with a shriek. A deliberate false alarm, this sets the spooky tone of Ellie Keel’s two-hander – a playwriting debut to add to a career that already includes novel writing, theatre producing and the co-founding of the Women’s prize for playwriting. If Skye: A Thriller has more narrative drive than dramatic purpose, it is no less a confident and absorbing debut.
It stars Dawn Steele as Annie, a shell-shocked and determined woman trying to piece together her memories of an unfortunate family past, bound up in an August 1995 holiday on the island of Skye, where the mist rolls down from the Cullin hills to give a suitably ghostly atmosphere. James Robinson is on hand as a documentary producer filming her recollections – projected on a screen in closeup in Matthew Iliffe’s production – and also to play brother Brawn and other male parts as the story unfolds.
It is the story of a young family not quite reconciled to the death in a car accident of their father four years earlier. The shock of his sudden loss makes it all too easy for little brother Sammy to think he has spotted him across the beach – and for the siblings not to dismiss their eight-year-old brother out of hand.
Coincidence? Conspiracy? Ghost? None of the options are palatable and it only takes a silvery speeding car with no apparent driver to ratchet up the otherworldly tension.
The more that the circumstantial evidence mounts up, the more frantic the search and the more dangerous the efforts to get to the truth. In this rural tale, it is a sheep that goes bump in the night. The weather is as unforgiving as in any gothic chiller, but it is the rush to believe in the supernatural that leads to the real tragedy.
• At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 25 August
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