We're dirty. We're messy. We die. That's life.

On a remote Scottish island, an estranged mother and daughter are at loggerheads over how best to save their children. While Ella fights for her son's future, her mother Karen is terrified that Ella's environmental activism will her get killed. Trapped together until one of them gives in or lashes out, it quickly becomes clear that not all mothers know�best.�

Around them, at the mercy of the brutal North Sea and Mother Nature, their close-knit community is being pushed to the brink in a world which is changing too fast for them to survive.

Written by the award-winning 2015 IASH / Traverse Theatre Creative Fellow Clare Duffy and directed by Traverse Associate Director Gareth Nicholls, (Ulster American),�Arctic Oil�grapples with how trying to save the world could end up destroying those closest to us - and even ourselves.

Clare is a writer for stage, radio, television and is increasingly working in new story telling platforms such as digital games and virtual reality. She is also a co-director of Unlimited Theatre www.unlimited.org.uk which she co-founded in 1997.





Clare is currently working on The Big Data Show, a co-production with Perth Theatre for their main stage. The Big Data Show is a ground-breaking project integrating digital gaming, film and live performance. Clare is also currently developing a virtual reality project: And it Does Make Anybody Nervous.

Clare recently wrote Arctic Oil as part of her fellowship with The Traverse Theatre and Institute of Advanced Studies of the Humanities 2014-15. As a writer for television she adapted A Midsummer Nights Dream for CBeebies, in 2016 for the 400 year anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, which won the Royal Television Society's awards for Best Children's Programme this year. She has written the Cbeebies Christmas Show since 2013.

Clare received the new director's award from The Arches in 2011, when she wrote and directed Money the Game Show. This was remounted in 2013 at The Bush in London and toured the UK in 2013/14. It is published by Oberon Books.









Clare won a Pearson Award for her first full-length play, Crossings in 2003, which was published and toured the UK in 2005. This led to being Writer In Residence at the West Yorkshire Playhouse 2004 where she wrote A Good Man about a transman helping his father coming out of prison.

Clare was brought up in South East London and has lived in Edinburgh since 2004 with her wife and now with their son.