Scott Purvis-Armour reviews 'an essential Fringe experience.'
For twenty years, Irish chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan has been the undisputed empress of the Edinburgh Fringe. And after a one-year hiatus, she has climbed back onto her throne in Loveletter, a breathtaking new performance at Roxy Assembly.
Staged in the murky smoke of an atmospheric old church ruin, O’Sullivan leads audiences gently by the hand - like the Phantom of the Opera leading his ingenue into the bowels of Paris - as she masterfully reinvents the worlds of Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and all of your cool friend’s favourite vinyls across an exhilarating ninety-minute show.
The set list is curated like a museum exhibition. Opening with “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” by Radiohead, O’Sullivan laughs and jokes with her familial audience, showing them junk she bought online during the pandemic before crashing into songs like “Jubilee Street” by Nick Cave. Her merry-go-round performance of Dillie Kean’s “Look, Mummy, No Hands” is perhaps the finest four minutes at the entire Fringe, each moment incandescent with her talent in storytelling through song.
O’Sullivan walks the tense twilight between heaven and hell, overlooked by stone angels and memorials to the fallen war dead: clad in the black of the grave and with a heart full of laments, she sings with the whispering beauty of an angel at prayer.
Words fail when describing the power of her voice - it is a red match head, waiting to be scratched, which threatens to burn us all down in a furnace of love and anguish. Something otherworldly sits in the air when she drops her dark eyes to sing and thumps her battered silver heels to the floor. It is a deeply communal experience, and every soul in that church feels it.
At its heart, Loveletter pays tribute to two of O’Sullivan’s lost loves - Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan of The Pogues. Interspersed with funny and human anecdotes of her relationship with the pair, she brings a haunting music box quality to songs like bodhran bangers like “The Broad Majestic Shannon”; the O’Connor/MacGowan duet “Haunted” becomes an audience hymn to friendship and love, and every note feels meaningful and aflame.
The result is an essential Fringe experience. Dazzling. Mesmerising. Bewitching. Superlatives fail when describing the power and presence of Camille O’Sullivan, insignificant in the wide expanse of her talent.
Camille O’Sullivan: Loveletter performed at Assembly Roxy. It’s run at this year’s Festival Fringe has concluded.
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