“This is the story of a young woman empowering herself by doing six impossible things everyday before breakfast, and empowering others in the process.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

Kona Morris is my own great discovery of Edinburgh Fringe ‘26. If Theodore Roosevelt – the unstoppable, seriously try and stop him, literary outdoorsman, the death-defying explorer and naturalist – if TR was recast as a Disney princess, the result might look and feel a lot like our Kona and with the same capacity to hold a capacity crowd at the edge of their seats.

We enter to find a stage bare of bears and salmons and whirlpools and tiny log cabins in the middle of somebody’s somewhere but a long way from everywhere else’s creature comforts. Flicking back on my phone to the photo I took on entering, I am shocked at how, from the minimalist, ultra-Fringey compactness of Greenside’s Ivy Studio on George Street, such a massive story, still writ large across the mind’s eye, could have emerged. Morris achieves levels of total immersion storytelling that make it possible to believe that Alfred really did sing to the Vikings before Edington and Wedmore without them St Edmonding and burying him.

Walking softly but carrying a BIG stick, not THE big stick I am happy to learn later, Morris shares her lived experience of falling in love with a native Alaskan man, moving to his village and becoming part of his world. There’s a final twist in the tale and a post-credits vignette that are the icing and cherry on this gargantuan-scale cupcake. This is the story of a young woman empowering herself by doing six impossible things everyday before breakfast, and empowering others in the process. If the Victorian Edwardian adventures of Roosevelt’s day were in possession of an iota of Morris’ capacity for regard, reverence, and reflection for pre-Columbian roots, perhaps the world would be less beset with toxic cultural tumbleweed. Maybe.

Much of America (it seems to this horrible Auldworld nationalist) is yet to make the rigorous intellectual and spiritual journey undertaken in many parts of His Majesty’s Commonwealth towards recognising the value, the versatility, and the vision of First Peoples as well as the priceless inheritance their relationships with the world around them have nurtured down the centuries and millennia.

Kona Morris is an exceptional exception to this rule, an Arctic sunrise of hope that, with openness of mind, a bigness of heart, and a depth of soul beyond the ordinary, we can all learn more and better about what makes a successful community, a thriving society, and a valuable culture – and when it’s time to call it a day and live one’s own authentic life.

This is a story and a storytelling I hope my own girls will encounter on their journey to vigorous womanhood and the rough riding that the strenuous life inevitably throws at those whose faces are marred by dust and sweat and mud – the doers of deeds who are just trying to catch the California flight to a cousin’s wedding in this age having come off a long river journey seemingly from another time.

Come for the Disney princess telling the Alaskan wilderness like it is. Stay for the geometric storytelling that explodes the small arithmetics of a tiny venue. Get your two-sizes-too-big purple coats on and go see this!

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