Weather Girl at Soho Theatre review: the hot mess solo show feels hot again

The “hot mess” one-woman show, a genre created by the original stage version of Fleabag, gets hotter and messier in this apocalyptic Californian monologue performed with fiery comic flair by American actress Julia McDermott.

Brian Watkins’ script casts her as Stacey, a Barbie-perfect Fresno TV weather reporter whose dazzling smile and feathered blonde mane conceal family trauma, self-esteem issues and a drink problem. Worse, Stacey has to be bright and breezy — “your rise and shine” — while people burn to death in their homes behind her, California having become a tinderbox due to climate change denial. Today Fresno, tomorrow the world.

So there are big, urgent themes packed into the show’s spare, 60-minute running time, plus a dose of witchy mysticism and a woozy, nightmarish, American-Psycho quality to Stacey’s tales of drunk dating and workplace confrontations. It’s also very, very funny, tightly directed by Tyne Rafaeli, and performed with great skill by McDermott.

She navigates the twists from horror to humour deftly and brings subtle modulation to a character permanently on the brink of screaming collapse. She also seems to look like five or six physically different versions of Stacey, helped only by lighting, dry ice and a green screen where the character’s weather map would be.

We first see her at 4am, gripped with existential dread, and it soon becomes clear why. Her mother is a homeless addict, her colleagues are all assholes and she’s dating a tech bro whose name she can’t remember and whose house contains several sports cars and a “total absence of printed material”.

No wonder her travel cup — one of those insulated American monstrosities that resemble compact tactical mortars — is full of morning prosecco. News that she’s being promoted to Phoenix, an actual desert worse than Fresno’s strip malls and endless fast-food outlets, tips her over the edge.

After deliberately totalling her boyfriend’s speedster with both of them in it, Stacey drifts through heat-strafed streets, clubs and restaurants, boozing and blurry. (When he plaintively contacts her from hospital she texts back “need space: found cancer”, one of the most brutally funny lines I’ve heard on stage in ages.)

She reconnects with her mother in a karaoke bar and perhaps stumbles on a feminine energy — “the pull” — that could rehydrate humanity’s relationship with the earth. Or is this a dream? Stacey is an entertainingly unreliable narrator. Does she really hold down an image-dependent job along with a phenomenal alcohol intake and no sleep? Are her exultant physical assaults on annoying men real or fantasy?

It doesn’t really matter, because Stacey’s collapse is so engagingly vivid and so eloquently tied by Watkins to the environmental disaster happening around her. She is a symptom, even an emblem, of the problem, the perma-smiling talking head placating viewers who think wildfires are “a government hoax” and evacuation advice threatens their personal liberty.

Watkins, McDermott and Rafaeli are all established in American theatre and TV but the tailoring of this show absolutely channels Fleabag: a chaotic female character oversharing for a tight hour on a minimal set, launched into London after success at the Edinburgh Festival. It’s also produced by Francesca Moody, who had her first great success with Fleabag. Fortunately Weather Girl is a worthy descendent of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s creation that makes the hot mess solo show feel hot again.

To 5 April, sohotheatre.com