You might say Vera Shrimp is a weather whisperer. She studies rainfall and its precipitation cycles and is a trove of information. She is fourteen and lives in Northern England, perhaps in Newcastle. She also has a special gift:

“I can feel the rain, the colours, the sensation, the words inside each drop when they land on my skin and seep inside me. So that means that everything is different now. I can make things alright again.”

There is lot to fix.  While watching television Vera’s mother died suddenly from a brain aneurism. Her father was at the pub quiz and Vera was in her room. The death is the beginning of a drought and of the collapse of domestic order. Her father becomes virtually catatonic and Vera is left to manage the house and her increasingly erratic and besieged alienation at school.

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Writer Alison Carr has woven a subtle, poignant and endearing narrative as Vera manages her overhead projections and earnest data in a painful effort to regain her absent father’s attention and affection. The set adapted to the intimate space at Judy’s at Holden Street is an eccentric but orderly study with shelves stacked with books, VHS tapes, weather maps and a tapestry of post it notes highlighting some factoid or another.

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Alex Howarth’s fluid direction is enabled by the splendid solo performance by Martha Walker as Vera. Her fidgety movement, her bursts of delight in her tinkering science, the diligence of her notebooks, her distressingly lonely grief, the cruelty of her schoolmates, and the weird ecstasy of her mystic raindrops, are vividly evoked. The proximity of the actor to the audience further intensifies the experience.   

The Soaking of Vera Shrimp is reminiscent of, and equal to, the excellent Every  Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan and Johnny Donahoe where a teenage boy is desperately trying to rescue his mother from suicidal despair by annotating the joys of life.

Vera Shrimp is on a similar mission and, in just sixty minutes, Martha Walker, in her school blazer and Peruvian wool hat, with her visual aids and cascading water displays, depicts an intriguing world – not captured in Blake’s grain of sand, but in a droplet of wonder. This is a Fringe highlight.

The Soaking of Vera Shrimp is playing at Judy’s at Holden Street Theatres until March 22, presented by Patch of Blue, Verse Unbound and Joanne Hartstone Presents, Commissioned by Archimedes Theatre Project, China