On the face of it, ‘Windblown’ is quite an eccentric undertaking: a musically-enriched elegy for a 200-year-old Palm tree lost to the Biomes Project under construction at Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens. Were Karine Polwart and co-composer Pippa Murphy not resident artists with the Gardens when the lofty Sabal palm was due for the chop back in 2021, there would, doubtless, have been distinctly less ceremony.
But here we are, and how lucky we are that the right people were at the right place at the right time. How fortunate, also, that Polwart is a cracking storyteller, as well as an award-winning singer and composer.
Accompanied by long-time conspirator Dave Milligan on piano, she occupies a stage overseen by Neil Haynes’ fullsome, feathery arrangement recalling the crown of a palm, lit in kaleidoscopic pastels by Lizzie Powell, and Jamie Wardrop’s glimmering watery projections. It’s a serene, quietly celebratory space, otherwise empty and strongly evocative of the Palm’s transatlantic voyage when it was only a seed.
“But here we are, and how lucky we are that the right people were at the right place at the right time. How fortunate, also, that Polwart is a cracking storyteller, as well as an award-winning singer and composer.“
If there’s a more visually arresting production at the Fringe this year, I’d be surprised.
However, ‘Windblown’ would work extremely well as an audio-only show, such is the quality of script, music, and performance. Polwart’s haunting, pure tones and a swaying, folk-edged, yet minimal songbook conjure a vivid voice and life for the tree.
“You made me an island, but I was made to bend and bow, for so long, so long, so long; now let me go, let me go…” it sings to the last in a long line of keepers who have tended it with love and care. The irony of the yacht rigging propping up its weak, non-windblown trunk isn’t lost on it either. In song, and spoken word, the palm dreams of hurricanes it never knew, and of seas which never washed its fronds with salty water.
“…I have grown old,” it says, “and tall, and wise, but I have not grown strong, and I long for the wind, how I long for the wind…”
For a little while in the hushed Queen’s hall, you can touch the Palm’s venerable dreams and blow away with them. Producers Raw Material have achieved nothing less than magic.
But ‘Windblown’ is more than the anthropomorphised story of a terminally-sented tree. Around its bole, Polwart weaves a very personal tale of meeting it first and its keepers. Touching its trunk was like coming into contact with an elephant, or maybe a whale, immense, mysterious and unknowable. It outgrew the glasshouse it occupied to the point that the roof had to be raised, only to top out again. Generations had kept it healthy, watered it and fed it.
“Into your water, you poured your love…” sings the tree in response.
No one’s angry that the tree could not be saved when the renovations began. Yes, there’s sadness, but more so gratitude. Polwart threads stories of lost friends and lost pets into the show, not to equivocate, but to reinforce the sense of loss as a partner to life, and the importance of taking joy in what’s given, not just mourning loss.
Her memoir of the tree’s final days, what she learned of its peculiarly Edinburgh-centric history, and of the events which would coalesce in a ceremony to mark its felling, is a tale of human creativity and our instinctive call to creativity.
The ultimate result, ‘Windblown’ is a beautiful celebration of an absolute good: the multi-generational tending of one life by many others.
Show details
Venue: Venue 72: The Queen’s Hall, 85-89 Clerk Street, EH8 9JG (Google Maps)
Date(s): Sat 09 Aug to Wed 13 Aug (5 shows)
Time(s): 7:30pm (60 mins)
Age recommendation: 12+
Price: From £38 (concessions available)
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