As part of the Hamilton Fringe Festival, this collaborative work by three devisers focuses upon climate change. Each brings different skills and offers alternating vignettes throughout the hour, from graphics created live, to spoken word, and then to staged performance. Their intention is to ‘do something’ about climate change and in their case, it’s been responding creatively.

It opens gently, with abstract images of land, sea and birds playing, back projected on recycled boxes stacked to form a screen.  Then emerges a soft sound track of music and voice; people talking about their sense of place and the weather, while Paul Bradley creates a projected drawing across the back screen. There is much happening but it is beguiling and draws us in beautifully as his banded bird takes shape. 

Later he’ll create another image, this time more disturbing: a solo figure alone in a boat, moored against a flame coloured tree. Haunting and evocative, these works develop in real time – as a sharing of thought and line. 

Stephanie Christie is a fine wordsmith and she performs several solo pieces, backed by video seascapes, or simple lighting falling on the stacked box screen behind. Her themes are strong and serious and her presentation style is gentle yet hypnotic, so that the individual line or word is not as well remembered as the effect of her intention. She seems to be gently reminding us to care about the weather, despite admitting that this is not always easy to sustain.

Pip Smith wrote and directed a couple of the pieces for other actors who bring a change of energy to the show. The first, ‘Boys don’t C.Y.’ is mostly a monologue performed by Tosca Christie in pure white garb, and directed to Pip Smith, who acts as Christie’s black–clad negative alter-ego.  It’s a fanciful little reflection on possessions and invention. The later piece, ‘Baby it’s cold outside’, performed with high melodrama by Leanne Ireland and David Sutcliffe, is a futuristic domestic tragedy about acid rain and the horror of surviving, but having to stay indoors with the same person incessantly. It’s a grotesque piece that strongly contrasts with the gentle nudging reminders of the other pieces in the show.

Although uneven in pace, the alternating sequences in Storm Warning are linked by fine production values, with music by David Guilleminot, and beautifully managed lighting by Sean Lynch. Diverting costumes and a charmingly designed programme with one more free giveaway story, ‘The Tractor’, by Stephanie Christie, show the care and craft that have gone into this show.

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