World Premier
Julia McDermot. Remember the name.
Sometimes everything just fits. The actor, the script, the venue, the tech, the resonance of the story. This magic realist climate change monologue perfectly sums up the mood of our planet as it sleepwalks towards disaster.
Julie McDermott appears, bubbly and smiling, like a human clone popped from a blister pac marked ‘perfect’. Pencil thin, blond haired and button nosed bundle of positivity, squeezed into an electric pink tube skirt, like a walking neon glow stick. She is the Weather Girl for a Californian TV station and totters to the microphones, spotlights and blue screens like a seasoned pro. She reports on a house that is burning as a result of yet another Californian wild fire, with a perky professionalism, “I can’t hold this smile much longer, Larry’, she grimaces, before the station cuts to sports.
What she doesn’t know, and finds out a few minutes later, is that five people have just died in the house, having ignored the latest evacuation notice. The problem is that the alerts are now as common as parking tickets, the state has been on fire for the last four years, on constant drought alert, burning up and turning back to desert.
The soundscape to this piece is also beautiful and almost subliminal, a low undercurrent of background fuzz, a fire truck’s distant siren, the desert cicadas, the pounding of a disco beat, or the cracking of an approaching wild fire, all rumble along under the narrative.
Operating on a diet of collagen pills and Prosecco and with a tree-hugging drug addicted mother who went AWOL a long time ago, things are not quite so rosy behind the scenes. But maybe, just maybe, her mother holds the key to a supernatural ability that she has also inherited.
Like Ripley’s gun-toting heroine stumbling through the soon-to-be-vapouriest hull of the Nostromo, McDermott’s run from the monster of climate change is a trot that turns into a run that careens into a flailing, gasping smoke-filled, fire-licking, semi-conscious stumble. We are all willing her to reach her own escape pod by the end of it.
So, a sizzling performance from McDermott, and a show that could travel the world for the next ten years, pay the mortgage and then some, if she wanted it to. But I can’t see that. I expect McDermott is destined for far, far greater things.
The most amazing thing is that this show is not right at the top of the sixty-odd Edinburgh Fringe shows I’ve reviewed this year. It doesn’t quite knock Jonny Donahue off the top off my list of Brilliant Things, but it’s a darn close run second.
Recipient of a Fringe First award and presented with the Summerhall Lustrum Award on the night I was there, this is a show that is destined for great things and it was my absolute privilege to view it.
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 18th August 2024
North West End UK Rating:
Rating: 5 out of 5.
