For decades, Nishla Smith’s family have lived with a mystery. The story handed down across the generations was that Agnes, the girl who would have become Smith’s great-aunt, had disappeared at the age of nine, never to be seen again.
You would expect such a scenario to prompt an investigation in the manner of Who Do You Think You Are? with trawls through the register of births and deaths, interviews with strangers and revelatory trips to Malaysia, where she vanished. But Smith does something more beguiling.
In this fragile and tender show for Ulita theatre company, she performs a song cycle, accompanied by Tom Harris on piano, that responds poetically to the child’s loss. The songs are about fractured memory, the unknowability of the past and the imagined possibilities of Agnes’s life. They are more about the beauty of what might have been than the dull reality of what was, even while they evoke the damage of the second world war.
Musically, they have the feel of the great American songbook, all pure melodies and perfect rhymes, sung with a Judy Garland sweetness by Smith whose career as a singer means her first post-Edinburgh gig is at the Lancaster jazz festival. Poised and precise, she is a captivating performer.
With its spare text, What Happened to Agnes is primarily a musical experience, enhanced by scratchy hand-painted animations by Luca Shaw and brief interviews with Smith’s grandmother, Agnes’s sister. Smith has made hours of recordings but chooses here to give just a tantalising hint of the older woman’s memories, the better to blur the line between childhood fancy and fact. More exciting to believe the Malaysian jungle is spilling over with tigers and crocodiles and that your sister could one day vanish without explanation than to recognise the prosaic truth.
If the result is more gentle than dramatic, more atmospheric than action-packed, it is no less a gorgeous fringe discovery.
At C Aurora, Edinburgh, until 27 August
