This hour-long dark meditation on womanhood and family was recorded in front of a live audience during a typically bleak August day on Edinburgh’s Silverknowes Beach.
It is the inaugural work from Disaster Plan, a company set up by writer / director / performer Julia Taudevin and her long-time collaborator Kieran Hurley, who is dramaturg for the piece.
To add to an unsettling atmosphere, the colour tones are sepia and white, with the poetic text accompanied by a capella singing in Gaelic and English from a five-strong cast comprising Nerea Bello, Helen Katamba, Mairi Morrison, Beldina Odenyo and Julia Taudevin.
A series of mythic tales centre around death and loss, involving displaced souls, typified by a grandmother from Colombia, settled in Glasgow but suffering from dementia, who worries about her granddaughter, currently working for the UN in Myanmar where PTSD is beginning to set in.
A diffuse series of memories begins to solidify into a tale of danger and migration, which seems all too timely as Western nations desperately try to facilitate the exodus of thousands of mortally threatened individuals from Afghanistan where a new regime seems intent on depriving women of freedom and some citizens of their lives.