The dress is red for a reason. And it flutters in the breeze of the celebrated folk singer Rowan Rheingans’ mind like a ghost. A reminder, even. A warning. That people can and do repeat the mistakes of the past; that things can change, bit by bit, until they are almost unrecognisable. But thankfully, hopefully, as she reminds us towards the end of what is her first and it has to be said mighty fine Fringe show: “there are many ways to move in a circle”.

Shifting back and forth in time and place, she connects the horrors of the past with the fears of today through a simple story about her German grandmother’s youthful preparations for a dance at which she will christen the titular dress with the fizzy white wine of an autumn harvest and a smattering of dust from what will come to be known as “the field of misery”.

“War is shit,” opines her grandmother. “War is always shit.” But rather than erase it from the mind through drink or drown it out with a blast of happy-clappy, “nothing ever happened here”, sanitised pop, what Rowan advocates – quietly but passionately through one of her many original compositions, which emerge from the cracks in the text like birdsong – is to “make some room for sorrow”.

Co-written with Liam Hurley, and featuring several tracks from her soon-to-be-released debut solo album The Lines We Draw Together, Rowan Rheingans’ Dispatches On The Red Dress is a hymn to humanity, an appeal for calm in our “continent of turbulence”.

Told with the minimum of fuss and props (a semi circle of musical instruments bookended by wooden chairs between which she glides and spins in a figure of eight like the sundials she imagines herself and her grandmothers – including her Northern nan in glad rags and curlers), when she speaks we listen, when she pauses we lean forward. For the clarity of her voice, speaking and singing, is rooted in the truth. And the power of her words, scripted and sung, are steeped in poetry.

And underscoring everything is what she describes as a sense of beauty in the functional everyday, symbolised in the patient persistence of her grandfather’s favourite hobbies: peeling potatoes and cleaning out mud from the soles of his shoes.

Caught between the “responsibilities of adulthood” and the “desire to run and spin again like a child”, Rowan’s reminiscences of her German grandmother, her beloved “Oma”, still going strong in her eighth decade and counting, is a tale of hope tinged with sorrow, which resonates with today.

Peter Callaghan
Latest posts by Peter Callaghan (see all)