Dispatches on the Red Dress – Scottish Storytelling Centre – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Dispatches on the Red Dress at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

This is a magical piece of music and storytelling. The audience when I was there was rapt throughout and I cannot imagine anyone even dreaming of getting out their mobile phone while Rowan Rheingans is on the stage.

Rheingans sings and speaks within a ring of stringed instruments, all of which she makes excellent use of in the show. Her quality of focus is exquisite. She also walks in a simple circle to imitate the walk she takes around the village in Germany where her grandparents live.

There is basically no other staging. The story she tells is utterly engaging though and the pace she takes it is relentlessly slow, the slowness of a story resonantly told at the pace of human breath, consciousness and understanding, not the pace of today’s multimedia bombardment. This piece delivers its gifts gradually and without force or hurry. At the same time it is a live solo gig and the music can be bought as an album. It is also technically stylish.

This year’s award-winning show in at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Islander, which this show did not compete with thanks to the shortness of its run, brilliantly uses a looper and other musical technology to help to create its magic. In this piece Rheingans subtly brings in pre-recorded sound in a similarly precise and effective way to add to what she is doing live.

The story she tells is complex, deep and personal and resonates with the history of Europe in the 20th century in both its darkness and its light. Catch it on tour if you can.

Clare Walters