Ones to watch in 2023: Eilidh Loan

Not only is her acclaimed play Moorcroft going on a Scotland-wide tour in 2023, supported by the National Theatre of Scotland, Eilidh Loan also has some dream acting gigs on the horizon. Interview by Mark Fisher
Eilidh Loan PIC: National Theatre of ScotlandEilidh Loan PIC: National Theatre of Scotland
Eilidh Loan PIC: National Theatre of Scotland

Theatre is a precarious business. So much can happen between commission and production, it’s best nobody gets their hopes up. That is why Eilidh Loan took her time before telling her dad Garry the good news about her play Moorcroft.

She had already put him through the ringer once. The play, which she wrote and directed, was a fictionalised account of Garry and his pals setting up a football team in 1980s Renfrewshire, little knowing that ahead of them lay a catalogue of off-pitch tragedies, from cancer to addiction. A hit at Glasgow's Tron in February 2022, Moorcroft reflected Garry's story back to him.

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"To sit on that opening night holding hands with my dad and see him be really proud of himself for the first time in his life was just incredible," says Loan today. "He met up with one of his pals afterwards and they had an honest conversation about their past and the emotions they felt as 50-year-old men. To see that pride he has in himself now is better than any standing ovation."

A scene from the original production of Moorcroft, L-R clockwise: Sean Connor as Paul, Ryan Hunter as Tubs, Jatinder Singh Randhawa as Mick, Kyle Gardiner as Sooty, Santino Smith as Noodles and Martin Quinn as Mince PIC: John JohnstonA scene from the original production of Moorcroft, L-R clockwise: Sean Connor as Paul, Ryan Hunter as Tubs, Jatinder Singh Randhawa as Mick, Kyle Gardiner as Sooty, Santino Smith as Noodles and Martin Quinn as Mince PIC: John Johnston
A scene from the original production of Moorcroft, L-R clockwise: Sean Connor as Paul, Ryan Hunter as Tubs, Jatinder Singh Randhawa as Mick, Kyle Gardiner as Sooty, Santino Smith as Noodles and Martin Quinn as Mince PIC: John Johnston

The vigorous working-class comedy, bleak and funny in equal measure, was nominated for best new play and best ensemble in the CATS awards. The Tron was especially proud that 55 per cent of the audience said they were visiting the Glasgow theatre for the first time.

And that wasn't the end of it. Two months ago, the Tron announced it would revive Moorcroft for a summer run and would join forces with the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) for an autumn tour of the country. Loan knew all this in advance, of course, but only when it went public did she let her dad into the secret.

"I was so excited and it was so hard to not tell him," she says. "On the day it was announced, I sat him down and showed him the promotional video and said, 'This is the NTS's shows for next year.' When the Moorcroft poster came up, he was over the moon."

It was quite some year for Loan. Having graduated from Guildford School of Acting, she had made her professional debut in 2019 playing Mary Shelley in an adaptation of Frankenstein by Rona Munro. It opened at Perth Theatre and toured right until the start of the pandemic. Like all actors, she was caught out by the lockdown and when Andy Arnold, artistic director at the Tron, put out a call for actors who were new to the theatre, she took her chance and made an online application.

"I deliberately submitted myself as an actor delivering a piece from Moorcroft, chancing my luck in the hope I would get a recall and Andy Arnold would say, 'What was that piece from?'" she laughs. "And that is genuinely what happened. It speaks volumes for the kind of person Andy is that he would be so supportive of a young working-class woman."

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Recognising a talent worth cultivating, Arnold suggested she should not only direct Moorcroft but also act in a play to be directed by Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir. Opening only a month after Moorcroft, Me And My Sister Tell Each Other Everything, a tender two-hander about mental illness, was thrillingly performed by Loan and co-star Anna Russell-Martin and earned Sigfúsdóttir a CATS nomination for best director.

"Just to see those two posters beside each other was amazing," says Loan. "One day when I get my little flat, I'm going to have them on the wall. It was a huge part of my life and my family's life."

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Her multitasking will only continue in the year ahead. First comes Soul, a short film set in the modern-day northern soul scene. As writer, director and star, she goes on location this month in time for release in March, with the backing of Screen Scotland's Short Circuit programme. "It's a love letter to the northern soul community," she says. "We want to make Renfrew and all the towns outside Glasgow really cool and edgy."

Soon after, she will appear in How To Have Sex, a debut feature by Molly Manning Walker about a group of teenage girls on a clubbing holiday in Greece. "There are some gorgeous light-hearted moments in a film that deals with some pretty serious issues about party islands," she says.

For the time being, she has to keep schtum about the "very dream job" she has been filming for broadcast at the end of the year. In the meantime, she is happy to make ends meet working in Fred Perry, the clothing retailer, not only because, as a devotee of northern soul, she is passionate about the stock, but also because it keeps her connected as a writer.

It was in her lunchbreaks in the Fred Perry stockroom that she wrote Moorcroft and when producer David Pugh commissioned her to write another play, she reverted to form. She began the first draft of Cathy, a tribute to her two grandmothers, back where she started.

"I was unbelievably grateful to David Pugh for commissioning me, but I felt this responsibility," she says. "I was in my living room, trying to write and thinking, 'I need to get out.' So I asked if I could go back to Fred Perry and just sit in the stockroom. That's where I started writing Cathy. Being shut off and having to be in one room and write is not the one for me. I'm so jealous of people who can do that because I'm spending thousands on hot chocolates to sit in a café and work every day."

Moorcroft is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 13–29 July, then on tour, from 6 October until 4 November