'Weather Girl' review — this absolutely scorching solo play is like an apocalyptic 'Fleabag'

Read our review of Weather Girl, written by Brian Watkins and starring Julia McDermott, now in performances at the Soho Theatre to 5 April.

“You can small the earth burning and dying,” we’re told some way into Weather Girl, the, well, scorching solo play from American scribe Brian Watkins that has come to London after wowing Edinburgh audiences last summer.

But it’s the paradoxical achievement of this hourlong show that it feels ceaselessly alive. Funny to start with and by the end sorrowful beyond words, the play – and its thrilling performer, Julia McDermott – have reportedly caught the eye of Netflix, as is to be expected given that it comes from the same producer, Francesca Moody, behind such stage-to-celluloid sensations as Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. (Its London home, the Soho Theatre, first housed Fleabag back in 2013.)

Whatever its eventual fate, this is by no means merely a glorified pilot. Following hot on the heels of Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian’s comparably small-scale (and blistering) Kenrex across town, Tyne Rafaeli’s production suggests that theatrical intimacy can achieve a sizable impact. And Watkins’s writing really is a masterclass in narrative swerves, addressing no less momentous a topic than sin, even as its nominal landscape would seem to be the relentless California sun.

Watkins wrote the show for McDermott, his partner, so it’s little surprise that the play works so fully in tandem with its sparky solo player, who initially gives off the chipper vibe of a younger Reese Witherspoon, cascading blonde tresses and all.

At the start, McDermott’s character, Stacey Gross, is unassailable good cheer: “Smile, and say the sun’s gonna shine” is this Fresno meteorologist’s de facto on-air mantra, notwithstanding copious wildfires raging nearby (the play has only gained in topicality) and a station manager, Jerry, who wants to relocate her to the ever-arid Phoenix.

But Stacey’s life off camera tells a rather different tale. It’s not just that this self-confessed alcoholic keeps prosecco in her sippy cup – water there, as elsewhere, is identifiable by its absence. She goes on a date with a wealthy guy whose name she can’t recall, only to end up crashing his car and landing him in hospital.

Her drug-addled mother, who happens to be homeless, returns unexpectedly into Stacey’s life, their dynamic achieving something akin to the baleful power between Carrie and Margaret White, of Carrie renown. (And what is the mother carrying when first seen? That most essential “miracle”, water, in a story very much suffused with an idea of the miraculous: Stacey at one point even wonders whether mom might just, in fact, be a fish.)

Through the looming apocalypse, we’re reminded of the need at all time for uplift – “People want good news” – set against the ineradicable devastation on view around us: to be depressing, in her workplace, is to be scolded. It’s significant that Stacey may inhabit a home that, she reports, is “sociopathically spotless” even as the play chronicles a world on the edge of the abyss, her eventual absence of a GPS emblematic of a society that has lost its bearings altogether. Cannibalism, indeed, emerges along the way as a viable option.

Audiences, I’m sure, will absorb the show on various levels. Some may see it as a 21st-century variant on the 1995 film To Die For, and McDermott transmits a star quality worthy of Nicole Kidman, amongst others. Others may be drawn into a crushing anatomy of loss worthy of Chekhov, whom the text rightly references in an epigraph by Joan Didion.

Whatever your response, you won’t soon forget the sight of Stacey weaving her way amidst several onstage microphones as she weaves a cautionary tale worthy of constant amplification. (The expert designer is Isabella Byrd, late of Cabaret.) “I am your rise and shine,” Stacey says, her voice swooping upwards, but it’s been some while since I’ve come across a play so fully destined to haunt my sleep.

Weather Girl is at the Soho Theatre to 5 April.

Photo credit: Weather Girl (Photos by Pamela Raith)