★★★★
How can a spiralling climate send humanity tumbling down an emotional crevasse? This is the question that The Santa Ana, from Crossed Wires Theatre Company, seeks to answer. And it does so in an eerie, gripping fashion that uses the forces of nature as a catalyst for increasingly dramatic and devastating behaviour.
Laurie Bayley-Higgins’ play is inspired by the author and journalist Joan Didion’s writing about the Santa Ana winds that bake California multiple times throughout the year. The longest Santa Ana event in November 1957, as referenced during the performance, lasted two weeks. It is widely believed that the winds trigger adverse downturns in people’s moods, to the point where horrendous crimes and incidents have taken place during previous Santa Ana events. Crossed Wires use the Santa Ana Winds to offer a simultaneous portrait of ecological and emotional decline, which sees mental health dragged into the gutter as the world bakes and burns (although any glaring message about climate change is not presented with the immediacy you may expect).
Different characters and storylines give way to dramatic readings of Didion’s work that range from fascinating to disturbing, with close-up projections of the action playing out on the back wall like some foreboding timestamp. A single salt lamp, meanwhile, forever glows like the baking sun, neatly placed in the centre of the stage so that its presence feels inescapable. Disconcerting hums and tunes backdrop scenes of intense, shocking, or sometimes quite strange confrontation. At its best, The Santa Ana traps you with the characters, powerless to fight this recurring natural phenomenon. This is not only a performance, but an ambitious sensory experience. Perhaps too ambitious, since the technical elements get away from the cast now and then, but what they cannot capture in terms of the winds’ scale they admirably compensate for with intensity.
Different portraits of physical and emotional toil are brought to life with drama and resourcefulness by the cast. They fill a variety of roles, from seemingly adulterous spouses to machete-wielding neighbours and sons who cannot identify what aggravates them beyond an inescapable curse of tiredness. Given that only two actors fill almost all of these roles, you do find yourself longing for more pronounced differences between the characters at times, but both excel at bringing grounded, troublingly realistic individuals to life during a time of increasing hardship.
The Santa Ana captures how heading to climactic catastrophe lends itself to wretched states of mind, even if the wider point about climate change—while not absent—is hardly crying for attention. Then again, coherent thought and messaging seemingly go begging during a Santa Ana event, and Crossed Wires do a formidable job of presenting people on the ragged edge at the mercy of nature.
The Santa Ana is being performed at C ARTS at 1:35pm until 11 August as part of Edinburgh Fringe 2024.
Words by James Hanton
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