June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music and Me is a clever five-star play

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★★★★★Walk the streets of Edinburgh, and you’ll soon notice the rash of posters advertising tribute shows to famous singers and musicians. It’s as if the city has turned into one big jukebox. The actress Charlene Boyd’s portrait of a legend of country music belongs in a different category altogether.
Instead of a dutiful journey through the back catalogue of the woman who was best known as the wife of Johnny Cash (she died in 2003, just months before he left us too) Boyd has created a play that is part documentary, part concert, part confessional. Although she starts proceedings dressed up retro-style, wearing a dark lacquered wig and a turquoise gown, circa 1955, she puts an autobiographical spin on the proceedings, explaining how she worked on the project during lockdown, treating it as a way of coming to terms with her daily struggles as a harried single mother.
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While Edinburgh certainly isn’t short of productions in which storytelling serves as a form of self-help therapy (I saw three more in the same day as this) there are no saccharine or apple pie homilies here. Boyd is a spiky, noisy soul who isn’t averse to scattering f-words around when she is riled.
Off she goes on a pilgrimage to the Appalachians, seeking out details about the woman who co-wrote Ring of Fire and learnt her craft as part of the revered Carter musical family. It just so happens that the venue for this stunningly atmospheric co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and the company Grid Iron is Summerhall’s Dissection Room, dressed up like a cabaret with soft lights and elegantly decorated tables. Boyd takes a metaphorical scalpel to her subject, and isn’t averse to waving it in the faces of old-school male chauvinists who still hang out at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. When she finally tracks down Carter’s daughter, the larger-than-life singer Carlene Carter, they bond for the simple reason that they are both free spirits.
Her vocals more than pass muster on the songs, and she gets impeccable support from her three musicians, Harry Ward, Ray Aggs and Amy Duncan, who are also called upon to give voice to some of the colourful characters she meets along the way. How, I wondered, would Boyd and the director Cora Bissett smuggle the Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash, into the piece? It’s such a clever touch to have his presence symbolised by a hefty double bass case, which this poignant but feisty version of Carter caresses with real emotion.80minTo August 24, edfringe.com; touring August 28-September 22, gridiron.org.uk
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