Far away from the fray of the Fringe is a little refuge in the gentle hands of performer Ian Cameron. He waits for you in the grounds of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for A Walk at the Edge of the World. He is a distant figure with an orange umbrella standing, most appropriately, near Charles Jencks’s land art Landform.  You are standing on the steps of the Gallery being given quiet health and safety instructions and a badge. It’s been a rush to get here. Of course it’s raining and you’re kitted out for it.  You walk towards the figures forming a ragged circle around Cameron who is wearing a grey overcoat and brown corduroy trousers.  He checks you’re present and listening, then tells you about his recent hip operation that has caused him to have to learn to walk again and how he dreamed of walking while he was in hospital having his operation.

You are then invited to accompany him on a walk in silence and advised to give your senses full freedom. It’s a long focusing exercise that gradually resembles a short pilgrimage. Time does a strange thing while you walk. The terrain is moderately challenging in the rain, drawing you away from the gallery, across the road where you are conscious of traffic noise. Then you go down some steps and along the river, over bridges, through archways and eventually up steep steps towards the site of the performance, a quiet place away from the main gallery.  It’s Sunday so it feels like going to church.  The physical act of walking has succeeded in focusing the mind and helps to make you responsible for your experience of this piece.

You cross the threshold that becomes the second beginning of the piece.  You enter the performance space, time to take off wet clothes and find a seat.  At this moment of intermission you become part of a community and get to see again who else has come on this journey you shared as one within a silent community of walkers.

What then transpires is an illustrated talk – like any gallery or educational talk in a public space that might relate to an experience you have just had.   Cameron breaks the silence in a change of gear, more upbeat.  The talk is accompanied by Cameron’s/the character/the guide’s slide show.  We don’t know his name but through his talk we begin to learn about his life, in particular his mother and father’s religious fervour, his mother’s love of walking, and the strange unspoken tensions that lie within his family. So for 45 minutes we roam through terrain trodden by our guide and what emerges are fragments of a story about this very lonely man who has walked alone it seems almost everywhere.  He tells us that he might have walked to China at the time when Britain was attached to the continent.  We are a quiet attentive audience and it is quite lovely to witness the subtle expansion of our vision as the simple slide show crossfades back and forth between his screen and a larger screen, which gives a different scale to the material shared with us.  Unfortunately the white wall of the gallery space tends to wash some of the clarity of this, which is more tangible on the show’s trailer.

One senses mostly an awkwardness in this enthusiast’s sharing of his journeys fuelled by an almost obsessive need to unravel and trace the roots and journeys within his family history, an obsession fed perhaps by an unspoken and knotted grief at the loss of his mother.

In terms of form, Magnetic North, a company known for work that seeks to place the writer at the centre of the play-making process, is asking bold questions about the nature of theatre and A Walk at the Edge of the World also asks questions about narrative and truth. Is what we hear Cameron’s story? Whose story, or stories are these and how have they come together?   Director and writer Nicholas Bone keeps the form loose and open.  You can make of it what you want: these narrative sequences, non-sequiturs, dead ends, and short cuts may trigger associations and memories for its visitors/audience. This is work so far away from the sound bites and bold summaries typical of the Fringe. Both the walk and the talk offer a chance to quieten the mind and consider the proposition that sharing the life of another human being may consist in wandering through otherwise overlooked detail and irregular but infinitely rich pathways.

In the wake of several recent and highly successful biographical films about women performed by high status actors (Streep – Thatcher, Mirren – The Queen and less recently Woolf – Kidman), it is interesting to see Susanna Hislop here working within that genre with her collaborator Anna Ledwich and seeking her own autobiographical story within the biographical and historical accounts of these iconic women: Margaret Thatcher, Marilyn Monroe, and Virginia Woolf. These three muses serve as the stimulus for this devised piece, which has gone further than much devised work, which requires many drafts and lots of throwing away. There is still more to throw away here concerning the stimulus, especially when in this case you are eventually drawn into the performer’s own personal story of mental illness which is far more interesting than the stories of her celebrity helpers.

The piece begins with a voiceover introduction from Susanna explaining that this is a play about her making this piece. So we know where we are: very firmly in process and, as it turns out as the piece progresses, within Hislop’s therapy. She enters in a costume reminiscent of the game of Consequences: head is wig of Marilyn Monroe, upper body is jacket and rosette of Margaret Thatcher, lower body, knickers, and wellingtons of Virginia Wolf. The stage is carved up similarly: stage right Monroe’s terrain, stage centre Thatcher’s platform, and stage left, Woolf’s kitchen, later denoted by a washing pail and stones.

After a self-deprecating apologetic introduction about a wasp sting, nothing to do with the show – she says – but everything to do with procrastination, revealing a performed reluctance to get on with it, Hislop finally dives into the piece, taking on and imitating the three muses with confidence and conviction, with asides to Streep and Kidman. She is an accomplished actress with strong skills (she’s very good at accents) and an assured confidence with this very small audience. But it’s performed in a state of panic and the physical sequence allows little time for her to work with the objects on stage. What ensues skates over the eating habits, obsessions, and fears of the three subjects, for instance Margaret Thatcher’s invention of Mr Whippy ice cream. Food obsession seems to be the main theme here. There is a long sequence about food where all the food references relating to each character mix and match (again the Consequences motif). We finally get to the crux of the piece: Susanna Hislop’s mental state and how she became diagnosed with a mental illness, demonstrated through her obsession with weight, her paranoia about lacking a boyfriend, and her obsession with connections. She reveals an intricate research flowchart pinned to the back of one of her many filing cabinets that could be construed as the scribblings of an obsessive but is the thought processes that have informed the development of the show, harking back to her introduction. As a young Anne Frank fan one understands her reading from her young adolescent diary, but I would have preferred insight from the older woman rather than a loose and unsustained allusion to a fictional character, in this case, Adrian Mole – again evidence of the need to weed out some extraneous material. The women she is obsessed with are projected onto her relatives, and we learn about her alcoholic grandmother and ultimately her personal desire to be a good and successful actress. Through this confessional monologue we forgive her and are even complicit with her in choosing her final fantasy, the Oscar acceptance speech. One of the most powerful moments I felt was her exit which, like her entrance, was protracted – but the sound of her voice over the microphone in the corridor made me think she has a creative fever which never lets her go.

There is nothing better than sitting at the feet of an elder telling you the story of her life. This particular elder, Lynn Ruth Miller, is a wonderfully natural storyteller. A person’s life is unique and you know you are getting a unique experience here. She enters the tiny space with the audience forming a right angle around her, and a shiny-faced young keyboard player plays her in. The diminutive figure that is Lynn Ruth Miller is carrying a suitcase and wearing an elegantly flowing kaftan-style top over royal blue leggings. She sings the title of her piece, which is funny and totally engaging. She has caught you immediately. The 60 minutes contains the fascinating story of her life so far in chronological order. She tells us of her Jewish mother who controlled her as a very young child by refusing to let her do anything until she finished her milk. Needless to say she stayed stubbornly in her high chair for an interminable time until an auntie rescued her, chastising her mother for giving her sour milk and inviting Lynn Ruth for a chicken supper that would conclude with her favourite – tapioca pudding. Food is the major feature in these yarns and one is astounded at the scale of her food consumption.

There’s a lovely sequence about sending numerous valentines to every boy who had ever shown interest in her, to no avail. As you listen, you realise you are getting nigh on a century of anecdote and therefore historical transition here and that is interesting as you see that time has also written itself on Lynn Ruth’s body and face – you are so close to her that you cannot help but look at her with this kind of curiosity. You realise too, that you are listening to someone actively and joyously relating stuff from as long ago as the 1930s and that she remembers clearly enough to embody and revisit that little girl of that very different time. At this moment older woman and little girl mix in a way that is impossible for younger actors to achieve.

Lynn Ruth Miller: Not Dead Yet is as delicate as it is heart-warming. Thank goodness Lynn Ruth Miller is not dead yet and she promises more from where this one came from.