Night Waking at The Macphail Centre

Anna Bennett is losing the plot. She is supposed to be writing a book. Instead, she’s not sleeping, barely thinking, and definitely not winning any ‘Mother of the Year’ awards. Her island retreat—remote, wild, windswept—should be peaceful, but between the kids, the endless mess, and the unsettling discovery in the garden, there’s no peace to be found.

Anna is not just fraying at the edges—she’s unravelling. And the past is creeping in through the cracks.

As she grapples with her own maternal ambivalence, a buried history begins to rise. Set against the eerie backdrop of a Scottish island, Night Waking is a dark, vicious, and unexpectedly funny one-woman play about exhaustion, colonialism, and the things we wish we could unearth—or forget.

With a script that flickers between biting humour and unbearable tension, this adaptation of Sarah Moss’s novel by Shireen Mula is an electric, unmissable solo performance.