Fringe 2025: Mairi Campbell goes deep into indigenous Celtic heritage

The National

4 days ago

The Edinburgh-born singer, best-known internationally for her version of Auld Lang Syne used in Sex And The City: The Movie, is playing an alternating trilogy of shows at this year's Fringe Festival.
Each spotlights a period of her life; her younger years in Pulse: middle in Auld Lang Syne, her older in Living Stone – and her interpretation of the wider journey she went on during these decades.
'I think audiences enjoy the variety. And it keeps me interested, rather than just standing and singing for an hour, which I've done a lot of and still like, but this gives me more to play with.'
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I went to her third show on Thursday evening, Living Stone, and when entering the theatre I saw two fiddles on stage, alongside the talisman stone she spoke of so fondly in our interview a few weeks earlier.
The stone was found on her great-grandmother's croft by her brother-in-law when they were unearthing the foundations. He put it up against the wall and by chance, Campbell had been looking for a stone to create a pendulum to play.
'There it was. It's amazing. There're all these ripples, and layers. Yeah, it's beautiful.'
On our Zoom call, she carried the stone over. It was large and heavy, and Campbell had drawn it more than 100 times as part of a challenge in 2023.
'Each day I just had a little idea and off I went, trying something new.'
The show features dozens of her drawings, as projections acting as visual elements to the tales Campbell is telling.
'Lismore has a really ancient early Celtic history, and so part of the show was really introducing the audience to the background around Lismore and its history and also the history of what might have happened to the stone itself,' Campbell explains.
She wouldn't spoil the story in our interview, so I was intrigued to hear it.
Campbell tells the story through the character of Peggy, a woman living on the croft in Lismore who had to protect the stone, a mill stone, from being destroyed in the 1700s when they were banned by the landowners. Scots had been forced to use the landowner's mill, further reducing their way of life.
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I've never heard someone truly shout in Gaelic. It is known, to me at least, as a language of love, heartache, and song, but Campbell in performance roared. The strength of the language gave Peggy and every other woman from that era a voice, and her actions, burying the stone to be found centuries later, were just one of the ways these women protected their heritage and connection to the land.
And that is what Campbell wanted to explore in the finale of the trilogy.
'This show has many themes of place, and our depth of desire to be connected to land more than we are.
'I think it speaks to climate change, to our relationship to the world around us, and what it means to be more connected.
'Underneath the surface, we're so deeply, intrinsically connected. We are like hairs on the body of Mother Earth, every human being.
'But it's been trained or educated out of us in many ways culturally, and so the show takes you back to your indigenous self.
The audience is faced with questions, prompting us to ask things like: Where is this indigeneity that we had? Is it in another culture or is it within me? How can we allow that out?
When you allow it out, 'you start to feel weird", she says.
'Then you start looking at God and realising the layers of teachings of the church or whatever it is that have pushed down the deeper necessity for us to have ceremony and ritual and connection to land things and that's where music lives in.
'It's one of its most basic functions and sound is as a technology for us to kind of land deeper in ourselves.'
At several points in the show, the audience is invited to harmonise with Campbell, digging into that ancient sound within and connecting with each other. The audience is given freedom to allow the sounds to flow and go where they are called to. 'Draw the note out,' Campbell guided us, or 'add in some consonants'.
Halfway through, Campbell turns the stone round, a physical moment to symbolise the arc in the show. Without realising, and as the songs and energy changed, I noticed I had been feeling uneasy for the first half of the show.
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The show gives you that sense of discomfort you have when considering questions about culture, heritage and indigenous self. It drew us all down into some sort of deep, dark, depth of earth and soil where the stone had been buried and it was unclear when we would return.
When we came up for air, Campbell gave us some tunes inspired by the Jimmy Shand band that she plays with her own community band in Lismore and did a wee jig with the hazel sticks laid out like a Highland dancer's swords.
Campbell is to turn 60 during her Fringe run, and reflected: 'We all have so many stories in us and so many encounters and relationships and places within us that we might not be aware of and in my work, it feels like bringing those threads of relationships, encounters and learnings together is a real honour for me, because it's, I suppose, quite cathartic, actually.'