Weather Girl at Summerhall – Edinburgh Fringe review

“Hi, are you here to see Weather Girl?”

A guy sidles up to me in the queue outside the Summerhall performance space.

“Yeah.”

“Can I buy your ticket off you?”

“No… I’m okay.”

“Oh.”

He walks on.

It’s unusual for an Edinburgh Fringe show to be so completely sold out already, but Brian Watkins’ Weather Girl (the third play at the festival produced by Baby Reindeer’s Francesca Moody) has proven itself to be one of the hottest tickets in a very packed-out town.

It’s not hard to see why – with a firecracker script and a masterful central performance, this is certainly about as good as solo shows get in Edinburgh.

The piece follows disillusioned Californian meteorologist Stacey (Julia McDermott), covering a tidal wave of wildfires sweeping across the local area. Haunted by memories and visions of her birth mother, long disappeared, Stacey sees the chance to gain magical powers while quietly drowning her sorrows with a Stanley cup packed full of prosecco. Like some west coast Don Delillo character, her nihilistic wants lead to moments of stupendous morbidity.

What sounds abstract and inaccessible on paper is electrifying in practice. Delivered to the audience as if some extended weather report, Watkins’ script plays with audience expectations. Forecasts are meant to be calming, reassuring experience, making the future feel friendly and predictable. Here, the familiar becomes unfamiliar: Stacey’s calm delivery becomes disquieting. When the natural order is completely upended, shouldn’t the supernatural become inevitable?

None of this would work without a brilliant central performance – McDermott mimics meteorologist patter while simultaneously exposing dark truths about the reality we face. Tyne Rafaeli’s direction jerks violently from the phantasmagorical to the horrifyingly vivid.

Plays about the climate catastrophe are certainly gaining in quality and prevalence these days, but Weather Girl remains vibrantly novel. While nudging at a possible redemption for humanity, it is swaddled in the perturbing projections of outright calamity – all laced with laugh-out-loud verve. Forecasting the apocalypse has never been this entertaining.