Lynn Ferguson: Storyland ★★★★★

There’s something about the notion “story” that implies something untrue. Something that’s made up. If you spin someone a yarn, you’re creating something fanciful. A fiction.

If that is your expectation of Lynn Ferguson: Storyland, the award-winning writer and performer may have other designs. Hopping out from behind the curtain on her very first performance at this year’s Fringe, she tells the audience that this isn’t the start and should just wanted to thank people for coming along. Especially for climbing up the stairs like mountain goats to the Billiard Room in Gilded Balloon Teviot – or as Lynn puts it with delicious candour, “fucking Narnia”.

Lynn has an instant affinity with an audience that can’t be faked. She chats to them like she’s a pal who has just popped round for a natter. It’s a conversational style that belies her craft as a writer. She chooses to breakdown barriers between performer and audience. Introducing her stage right area as her “professional storytelling area”, she immediately debunks it by noting that the microphone on the mike stand isn’t actually plugged in.

Anyone who has followed Ferguson’s career since Heart and Sole, her first solo show in 1995, will know what a beautiful, imaginative storyteller she is. But Storyland is not that. It has an unguarded, free-wheeling feel. It is chatty and informal – and importantly, direct.

Amidst amusing stories from her childhood in the 1970s, she begins to pick and unpick the idea of what a story is. From prehistoric people warning others of dangers via the power of story to a contemporary understanding of tones via phoning customer services are realising within two seconds whether you are “fine or fucked”.

She tells us stories of her and her family life in Los Angeles – which could potentially alienate her audience until a timely reassurance that it’s frequently indistinguishable for Grangemouth – and how they reacted to the Pandemic, when Russia invaded Ukraine and when the unthinkable overturning of Roe V Wade happened. It blends the personal and the political, a false distinction if ever we heard one!

One of the triumphs of Storyland is advocating how everyone perceives the world is entirely unique, that the stories in each of our heads are ours alone like a fingerprint, while at the same time finding common ground and relatability.

Talking about her own cancer, from discovery through an incredible circuitous route, to treatment, to thankfully being clear, it’s a brutal story. And it’s emotional for both Lynn and for so many in her audience. It’s as raw, honest and affecting as anything we’ve heard this Fringe. While Ferguson can find the humour in the darkest times, this isn’t “edgy material” for edgy sake. Although done with her trademark wit and humour, this is a performer sharing something personal – her unique experience – because it matters. There is a line about how the stories of all of the people in that operating theatre could have taken a different turn and yet they didn’t. It’s a simple thought but one that disarms you. The way we see Ferguson transforms from being a funny performer into a real person, a wife and mother, and there’s no false jeopardy in that story.

It’s not for us to reveal how this show leads into a righteous indignation about the state of the world. A fury and a fire that few could argue with. But the abiding feeling is one of compassion and indeed kindness. On a micro level, Storyland is the first time this Fringe that The Recs has seen a performer thank the technician during the show and include him in the show’s narrative. But also on a macro level, an excoriating rage against how inequality is reinforced by powerful and malicious forces is fuelled by a care and positivity about the world and its inhabitants.

It’s an extraordinary bold and vulnerable show that, alongside the soaring polemics, sows the beginning of some powerful thoughts. Lynn Ferguson has never been so good.