Devil's Point - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025

A young couple, Alisa (Laura J Milton - also the shows playwright) and Sean (Logan Rodgers), set out for a romantic hike into the Cairngorms, climbing the Devil’s Point. What begins as a weekend escape quickly turns into something darker and far more layered.

The hike itself unravels much like the couple’s relationship. Unprepared for the weather, short on supplies, and unable to mask their frustrations, Alisa and Sean find themselves forced to confront both the mountain and each other. Intercut with flashbacks to their early days together, the play deftly traces their journey from giddy beginnings to a bitterness that now defines them. What could have been a simple story of a couple in crisis becomes instead a meditation on how stories - personal, cultural, and mythical - shape the way we understand love, loss, and place.

Eve Miller’s direction and Milton's writing is striking in its inventiveness. Drawing on Scottish folklore, Milton layers the couple’s unraveling relationship with older tales of love, betrayal, and fate. Milton’s gift as as storyteller anchors the scenes, while Rodgers uses shadow and silhouette to conjure figures from legend, giving the play a spectral quality. Miller's use of music and light and weaving it into the fabric of the performances makes the stage becomes something closer to a living folktale than a conventional drama which immersive, elemental, and beautiful in its simplicity.

Since the pandemic, “Munro bagging” has exploded in popularity, often turning Scotland’s landscapes into checklist destinations. The play instead goes deeper with the weight of history and the voices especially of women that are embedded in these landscapes. In mocking the glossy “Welcome to Scotland” tourist slogans, the production becomes a far more authentic advert: one that honours tragedy and myth alongside beauty.

At its heart, the play is about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of love. Alisa clings to the tragic fates of Scottish women, but just as urgently she clings to the story of her own relationship and trying to thread meaning through the hurt and the disappointments between her and Sean. Sean, by contrast, shrugs these stories aside, focusing on the male-centred perspective. Their tension plays out on multiple levels: literally, in the folklore retold onstage and metaphorically, in their competing narratives of where it went wrong.  The play asks not only whose voices history preserves, but also what truths a couple chooses to keep ,bury or imagine..

As Alisa and Sean’s bond disintegrates, the play continually subverts expectations, refusing neat resolutions. Their 45 minutes together feel painfully lived in with tender one moment, vicious the next. The dialogue crackles with the rawness of a couple who know exactly where to aim their sharpest blows. What emerges is not just a portrait of two people, but an exploration of the myths, half-truths, and brutal honesty that shape the stories we tell about love.

Lee Hutchison 

4.5/5 

(This play was viewed on the last days of it's festival run)