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 utterly horrifying, as she finally faces the reality she and her media colleagues have been complicit in suppressing.
McDermott is both a very funny performer, and a blazingly honest and moving one; and if you’re searching for a 2024 Fringe show that speaks the brutal truth about the world we now face, and does so in brilliantly theatrical and gripping style, then our should seek out this unforgettable Weather Girl - while giving profound thanks for the cool winds that still blow in Edinburgh, even in the height of summer. Our failure to listen to the earth is one of the central themes of Weather Girl; and at the Scottish Storytelling Centre this year, the magnificent Scottish singer and theatre-maker Mairi Campbell is presenting her new show Living Stone, which - probably by no coincidence - offers a masterclass in that process of listening. Campbell has strong family connections to the island of Lismore, just off Oban; and this new show tells the story of a stone unearthed there a few years ago, an ancient millstone of hard rock, which appears as a strong second presence on stage.
Campbell’s meditation on this stone, and the story it tells, has produced both an exquisite 60-minute show - full of peace and contemplation, but also of powerful history, and 21st century observation and mirth - that is illustrated throughout by Campbell’s beautiful songs; and also an accompanying exhibition, exploring her myriad responses to the stone’s shapes and colours. The show is co-devised and directed by Cath Burlinson, with fine music and musical direction from David Gray. And it is transfigured by beautiful AV projections from Roddy Simpson and Julia Fayngruen, which project the textures glimpsed in the stone across the stage, and over the very stuff of Campbell’s plain hessian dress; making her seem truly part of the landscape she sings, in a show full of wisdom, and the clear perception that as the world spirals towards crisis, “the old ways are leaning in”, offering us insights that we would be wise to heed.
Joyce McMillan An American Love Letter to Edinburgh ★★★★ Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 300) until 25 August This beguiling show keeps defying expectations at every turn so it’s actually more than a little disconcerting when it ends abruptly and you’re shaken from its spell. Performed by Rick Conte, an American ex-pat who came to Edinburgh 35 years ago and never left, it’s a dual narrative that parallels Conte’s experiences in Edinburgh with those of Benjamin Franklin who made the journey in 1759. If this sounds more than a little dry, it isn’t — although you will learn quite a bit.
Conte had great success two years with an adaptation of The Man Who Planted Trees that employed his gifts as a puppeteer; here the only thing he brings to life is the past. A funny, personable presence, Conte has a charming round-the-houses way of telling a story that knows the value of context. Detail is all-important as he evokes a bygone era when there was no internet, you could smoke on planes and London pubs called last orders at 10 o’clock.
It’s this last culture shock that originally compelled Conte to make his initial journey to Edinburgh where he arrives right in the middle of the Festival and eventually scores a drumming gig with an indie band. This shouldn’t really parallel Franklin’s experiences hob-bobbing with the fathers of the Enlightenment but Conte keeps deftly switching between timelines so that they become the twin engines of the show, driving it forward. You find yourself leaning forward eager to know what happens next, even though what happens next — at least to Conte — is not really all that remarkable.
Perhaps that’s the point - life is what happens next. Relationships are strained and broken, children are born, stuff happens, history happens and still we lean ever forward eager to know more. It makes for a surprisingly compelling hour.
Rory Ford Life ★★★ Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 26 August A life drawing class in a theatre show that is also, appropriately, about life – specifically that of the model, Estelle, sitting in front of us, in her beautiful blue gown. Only today The Artist, our teacher, isn’t going to let her take it off. Is it because she’s too old, not attractive enough, or something else? As the audience sketch away, including four of us on stage with easels, Maria MacDonell’s experimental and at times profound two-hander (in which she plays the model, and Leo MacNeill The Artist) gradually reveals the story behind the set-up.
The idea of watching a show through drawing it is a fascinating one, even if it involves multitasking, especially if you’re on stage, as I am, and so also part of ‘the performance’. It works best if you try and find ways to combine activities but, as with any experiment, something it works and sometimes it doesn’t. There’s a danger that the concept gets in the way of a more conventional story of a life model who wants us to see her life and, perhaps, death, as well as her physical form.
As a provocative rethinking of the subject/audience, artist/model relationship, it’s extremely interesting and comes together in the moving conclusion, but elsewhere it feels like it’s still playing with form. Sally Stott The Cancer Comedy Cabaret ★★★ C ARTS I C venue I C alto (Venue 40) until 25 August Désiré Binam has pancreatic cancer. That’s one of the bad ones — when he was initially diagnosed he was told that the five-year rate of survival for his type of cancer was five percent.
That was four and a half years ago (due to medical advances it’s now much higher, thankfully). Last December, when the Parisian performer decided to bring this show to the Fringe he originally wanted to call it, I’m Not Dead Yet! Unfortunately, the doctors couldn’t give him any guarantees. Originally from Cameroon (“Just me?”), Binam demonstrates the value of plain-speaking and dark, dark humour.
Charmingly accented and nattily dressed, he explains that medical jargon threatened to distance him from his cancer and this is his way of reclaiming it. He employs a three-act structure purely so he can nip off stage quickly before retuning almost immediately with a cheery: “Not dead yet!” He takes you through his experience from symptoms to medical procedures and even shows you his operation scars. Not every joke lands — a disadvantage of performing in your second language, no doubt — but his good nature and sheer force of will make for a funny, life-affirming hour in good company.
Rory Ford.
