Weathergirl must be one of the hottest tickets of this year’s fringe, having sold out its entire run only a few days into the festival, and upon announcing four new performance dates last week, all were sold out within a few hours. The buzz around the play is enormous and the pessimist in me did wonder if this was the magic marketing touch of Francesca Moody Productions, but within the first two minutes I knew the hype was warranted.
We’re introduced to Stacey, dressed in the perfect Barbie-esque ‘girl boss’ uniform: skintight hot-pink pencil skirt, ironed white office shirt (with just the right buttons undone), blonde hair curled perfectly. She’s reporting from outside a house that’s caught on fire due to the wildfires in the San Joaquin California valley, bleached white teeth smile plastered onto a heavily made-up screen-ready face. We all learn soon after that whilst they were filming the burning house, a family of three children, two adults and a few dogs, burnt alive inside. They refused to evacuate, we’re told, because they believed the warning to be a government hoax. This initial image becomes central to the play, as we continue our daily lives obsessed with internet culture, brand images and public opinion, the world is burning around us, the climate catastrophe preparing to engulf us.
Despite its deadly warning, the harbinger through which this message is delivered to us is frightfully human. She, like many career-driven millennial women, is going on dates with men whose names she can’t remember, working a job with the dream it leads to somewhere better (in Stacey’s case, somewhere a little cooler, maybe on the ocean). Julia McDermott (Weather Girl is her Edinburgh fringe debut) is devastatingly good. Her depiction of Stacey’s descent into what can only be described as climate crisis despair is bizarre, yet so utterly human.
The combined genius of the playwright, Brian Watkins, and director, Tyne Rafaeli, makes this play a punch to the gut. Sharp, urgent and perfectly pitched, the hour flashes by and you’re left on the edge of your seat, gasping for breath in the smokey Cairns Lecture Theatre asking yourself how are we going to save ourselves from ourselves?
Weather Girl is on at the Cairns Lecture Theatre from August 1st to the 26th, at 18:00.
Image provided via press release