Julia McDermott in Weather Girl. Pamela Raith PhotographyThis multi Edinburgh Fringe comedy awards winner, doesn’t balk when it comes to smearing away America’s lipgloss and delving into the rancid underbelly of stupidity and greed, where rich guys fiddle while make-up melts! The acerbic narrative is all the more effective when delivered by television’s ubiquitous generic bimbo, the perpetually upbeat and smiling, blond American weather girl. With a homeless drug-addled mother who communes with Mother Earth (and who does a neat trick with water), is there any wonder Stacey exhibits detachment issues and hides her functioning alcoholic’s Prosecco habit, in a water holder?
Delivered as a stream of consciousness diatribe with sharply observed changes in pace, Ms McDermott’s valley gurl demeanour is at once annoying, yet superbly manufactured for the purposes of on-screen audience pacification. The TV execs know it and want to promote her to a station in Phoenix Arizona which for Stacey, would be like jumping out of the frying pan and into the… air fryer. As a nod to the professional esteem in which she is held, when she frustratedly tells the execs, HR and colleagues that she is going to murder them for merely suggesting the move to Arizona, she is applauded and everyone assumes she is joking and thrilled at the prospect, which she is not.
Director Tyne Rafaeli and set designer Isabella Byrd create an essence of the sports car driving tech-geeks and sleazy TV peeps which Stacy encounters through the simple green-screen studio set-up where she presents weather reports of impending Armageddon and then moves from mic to mic deploying the voices of the other characters she encounters in her unravelling world. The approach works exceedingly well, primarily because Stacey’s sense of hysteria and looming disaster is delivered with a largely flat and observational detachment which renders the events hilariously obtuse. The same methodology is deployed for KENREX currently playing at Southwark Playhouse and destined for a West End transfer) and I would heartily recommend that you catch both performances before the real world apocalypse engulfs us all.
