We've stonked into our seats, trying to stow dripping brollies and trying even harder to ignore the trickling chill where coat and neck parted company and the rain – as in the torrential downpour that has assailed this Fringe on an almost daily basis – has seeped in.

Like a silver lining in the recent cloudbursts, however, there could hardly be a better preparation for watching Idle Motion laying out the details of their caringly assembled new show, The Seagull Effect.

On one level, it’s about weather: specifically the hurricane that, in the autumn of 1987, arrived under the radar of the forecasters and laid waste to vast swathes of an unprepared and terrified Britain.

But on other, deeper levels, this piece looks at the nature of change. At how small, seemingly insignificant factors – the flight path of a distant seagull, a child playfully kicking up a dust cloud in sub-Saharan Africa – can spiral into the ether that affects long-term shifts in global climate. And at how a seemingly casual choice – sharing an umbrella with a stranger at a bus-stop – can alter the future of two lives in ways neither person would have predicted.

Grace Chapman’s relaxed, affable narrator makes engagingly light work of the hard facts, many of them science-based, that are laced through this evocation of the storm and its aftermath. She weaves herself into the fabric of that night, as if, like some of the voices that feed into the soundscape, she had actually been in Brighton when gale forces battered the area into a black-out full of hazardous debris and no transport or communication networks.

Some audiences will be old enough to remember the 1980s, will recognise the faces, the incidents, that take us back through time via images projected onto the white umbrellas that the cast use as portable film screens. It still comes as quite a jolt, mind you, when the woman is seen, panicking in an old-style telephone box, making a reverse-charge call to the ex she hopes will give her shelter. No mobile phones, folks. No quick way to connect with outside agencies, distant loved ones, or send snapshots of devastation to hungry news gatherers. How things have changed.

Our narrator will, from time to time, reflect on this, linking together thoughtful notions of chance, choice and consequence in terms of ordinary little lives – are the woman and man blown back together again, for instance? – and the wider reaches of eco-systems and chaos theory.

As with Idle Motion’s previous Fringe success, The Vanishing Horizon, this whole production, even though it’s on a bigger scale, is staged with resourceful imagination and a wonderful willingness to spend time and effort on crafting tiny effects that afford moments of breathtaking surprise. Whatever it’s doing outside, this is a show that you should rush to get a seat for.

The River People are in weather-defying mode by pitching up outdoors at Bedlam Chambers with Little Matter. The company is in full roistering, roguish ‘travelling entertainer’ mode, with a wee stage, scenery, props and puppets all with a slightly old-fashioned, hand-made air, as if hours on the open road were spent whittling, painting, sewing ... oh, and making music. Merry jigging music with a snap of folk song to it, dark dramatic music that lends atmosphere to the confrontations between the sad, disheartened man and the deceiving and malevolent Dark Shadow.

There is so much to love and applaud about the presentation, the humour and expertise bound up in this wistful, magical morality tale that it’s really sad to report that the canvas tent in the off-street car park backs onto an air-vent that roars like a bad-tempered beast. So if, like me, you’re in the back row then any quiet dialogue or softly spoken aside is lost in background noise. Folk in front of me clearly caught more of the text, and were well amused.

If River People are harking back to traditional story-telling skills that have their roots in rural communities and 19th century travelling folk, the Rashdash company could scarcely be more in the here and now, with Scary Gorgeous.

Abbi Greenland and her co- artistic director Helen Goalen pull out every conceivable stop – live rock band on-stage, an eye-catchingly acrobatic physicality in the movement, text that veers between the poetic and the graphically sexual – so it’s disappointing to find, as the piece goes on (and on) that it all feels over-egged, gratuitous even.

We’re being asked to look at sexual manipulation from various angles, including a less-than-convincing sub-plot about a teenage couple whose sex life is robbed of its naive ecstasy when he discovers an image of Helen, the wannabe famous rock chick, on a porn website. But Helen didn’t put it there ... it was a promo for her band ... she’s not that kind of girl ... Somewhere, in all the hell-for-leather romping about, which Goalen and Greenland account for with elan – there are interesting, cogent ideas. If only those issues had been allowed to strut, pout and thrust centre-stage, instead of slick bumping and grinding that looks raunchy and risque but is actually one of the safest, crowd-pleasing things to do on the Fringe.

The Seagull Effect runs until August 27, Little Matter runs until August 28 and Scary Gorgeous, not suitable for under 16s, runs until August 20.

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