Weather Girl ★★★★★ Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August Mairi Campbell - Living Stone ★★★★ Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 25 August There’s plenty of denial around on this year’s Fringe; artists retreating into the intensely personal, as if defeated by the scale and complexity of the political problems we face. You won’t find any of that, though, in US writer Brian Watkins’s searing new monologue Weather Girl, playing at Summerhall in one of the most thrilling performances of this year’s Fringe, from New York-based actress Julia McDermott, herself a ‘California girl’ by birth. In Tyne Rafaeli’s breathtakingly intense but beautifully-paced production, McDermott plays Stacey, a television weather girl in central California who finds herself reporting on ever-intensifying wildfires in the home state she loves.
Stacey looks the part, with her blonde beauty, miles-wide smile and candy-bright outfits; and her career is on the rise. One day, though, after she reports from in front of a burning home which turns out to have had a family of five inside, her facade begins to crack; and begins a long spiral away from the synthetic reality she presents on screen - 105 degrees in the city, lovely day for a barbecue - towards a confrontation with the coming climate apocalypse that also involves a strange reunion with the mother who abandoned her long ago. The detail of Stacey’s journey veers between the wildly comic, the poignant and the u.