Living Stone

Living Stone is the final piece in a trilogy of folk music theatre works that trace Campbell’s journey through the eye of a quern stone.  It won a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2024.  

Living Stone follows Pulse (2015) and Auld Lang Syne (2018) to complete Mairi’s Pendulum Trilogy. It draws together story, song, and mysticism in a deeply personal performance that resonates far beyond the stage.

Origins and Concept

At the heart of Living Stone lies a millstone unearthed on the Isle of Lismore, where Mairi’s great-grandmother was born and lived. This 400-million-year-old quern stone sparked an unfolding of memory, image, sound, and belonging.

What began as quiet reflection grew into a public act of remembering.  Living Stone speaks to our shared need for grounding, healing, and connection.

Creative Team and Structure

The show is directed and co-created by Kath Burlinson, with musical collaboration from Dave Gray. Through live viola, voice, movement, and projected paintings of the stone Mairi weaves her story with delicacy and fire.

The structure of the show is in three acts.  This contemporary odyssey drawing on rhythm and plot is poetic and linear.  Her artwork adds rich texture to the performance and deepens the visual and emotional landscape.

The Show’s Heartbeat

Living Stone lives in breath between past and present. Each performance is built around three primary elements:

Storytelling: Personal and ancestral threads are drawn together. The words ‘hole’ and ‘whole’ anchor the storyline with the actual hole in the quern stone sharing the stage. It’s a potent symbol.

Music and Song: Mairi’s voice and viola are her compass. The show is mostly sung through holding space for grief, joy, and mystery. “The Old Ways Are Leaning In” is one of many original songs that land with tenderness and depth. 

Physicality and Interaction: One of the most powerful scenes unfolds as Mairi builds a pendulum on stage. Using hazel branches, cord, and the stone, she constructs a structure that swings with presence and bows it like a living instrument. The rhythm that emerges is primal, felt in the chest more than heard with the ears.

Visual and Sonic Landscape

Lighting and projection design by Roddy Simpson and Julia Fayngruen lifts the work into dream space. Patterns ripple. Earth and sky swirl behind Mairi. Her paintings play an important role. Their elemental energies are an extension of the stone, alive, layered, ancient.

Mairi and Dave Gray’s score moves through the piece like a current. Viola, voice, and sound design create a sonic field where stillness and song meet.

Mairi's dot drawing - "Clearing the well” A3 – acrylic on paper - Living Stone

Mairi Campbell – ‘Clearing the well” – A3 – acrylic on black paper

Audience and Critical Response

Living Stone has been met with heartfelt praise:

The Scotsman called it “an exquisite 60-minute show full of wisdom, peace and contemplation,” winning  ***** for its combination of history, humour, and quiet power. It won a coveted Fringe First award in 2024.

Edinburgh Music Review described Mairi as a “national treasure,” praising her many gifts as musician, storyteller, and creative force.

Audience members have spoken of the show as a “spellbinding journey” with a “multi-sensory feast.”

Exhibition and Extended Experience

In 2024, alongside the live show ran an exhibition of Mairi’s Living Stone paintings. These artworks were made during her 100-day practice of daily drawing with the millstone.

Held at the Scottish Storytelling Centre during the Fringe, the exhibition invited audiences into visual dialogue. Layers of form, colour, and resonance reveal the stone in its many moods and meanings. The paintings echo the themes of the performance and offer a quiet space for reflection beyond the theatre.

In 2025 there is no exhibition but CD’s prints and cards of her paintings will be for sale after each performance. 

Pendulum Trilogy and Artistic Arc

Living Stone completes the arc of the Pendulum Trilogy. Pulse explored rhythm and musical ancestry. Auld Lang Syne invited questions of tradition and cultural legacy. Living Stone grounds it all in earth and body, closing the circle with presence and peace.

Each show stands alone. Together, they form a portrait of an artist listening deeply to the land, to memory, and to the living threads that connect us.

Broader Significance

In a world that often moves too fast, Living Stone slows the pulse. It invites us to remember what endures: the ground beneath us, the stories that hold us, the music that calls us home. The performance honours resilience, shared inheritance, and the healing power of song. In a time of increasing disconnection, Living Stone becomes a gentle act of reconnection.

As Mairi says: “Living Stone is a deeply personal piece that speaks to the universal need for connection and wholeness. I hope it can inspire others to find their path to healing and community.”

Why You Should See It

  • For its artistry: music, movement, story, and image come together with integrity and grace.
  • For the journey: humour, beauty, and emotional depth flow in equal measure.
  • For its roots: Scottish in voice, universal in feeling.
  • For the invitation: to pause, to listen, to belong again.

Living Stone is folk theatre at its most elemental. Quietly radical. Fiercely tender. It doesn’t shout. It sings.

Come see the show. Let the stone speak!

For marketing pack and high-res photos, visit Media & Promoters.

"Campbell’s meditation on this stone, and the story it tells, has produced both an exquisite 60-minute show - full of peace and contemplation, but also of powerful history, and 21st century observation and mirth - that is illustrated throughout by Campbell’s beautiful songs; and also an accompanying exhibition, exploring her myriad responses to the stone’s shapes and colours."
Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman
"Campbell seemlessly blends story, drama, music, song, dance, movement and her stunning visual art to take us on this journey from underneath the millstone, through it's centre into the possibilities of the future. Strongly recommended"
Iddo Oberski
"There were times when the tears rose in my eyes, the hairs rose on the back of my neck – I wanted to be there, on Lismore, alone with the stone and its stories. This is a truly magical, mystical, melodic combination of words, music, art and drama."
Thuranie Aruliah
"‘As you sang the contours of Glencoe, I was reminded of something my Mikmaq friend of the First Nations of Nova Scotia told me, that the music of a people come from the land. The Mi ‘kmaq music is lyrical. Being a people of the ocean, the plains, music reflects the harshness and dryness of the land. You sang Scotland! Thank you for your beautiful and heartfelt show."
Jackie
"Blown away. Layers of sound, words, images, light and shadow that transfixed me. An emotional journey that told the story but also made me feel it’s history and it’s relationship to you. Thank you for sharing the inspiring me."
Dawn Star
" Beautiful, transformative, engaging. Thank you so much for such a wonderful, unique experience. Every person in the audience I am confident felt as deeply touched as myself and I am so grateful to be allowed to experience a life-changing moment with so many. Thank you, thank you, thank you."
"Thank you Mairi I loved that so much. I enjoyed your fiddle classes at St Brides a few years ago. Your relationship with rocks really fascinates me. I have felt recently that old stone walls have a deep spiritual significance and relate to man and women's relationship with God and the Universe. A lovely performance."
JS
"Lovely show, very thoughtful, and the idea of creating a symbol of community and creativity. The lands and the people who live in them bringing hope and positivity and music. We’re all connected in what we all hold a passion for. Thank you for the show."
Juno
"I loved the simplicity and yet wealth and depth of your very moving performance. Totally mesmerising, liminal, heart warming and lovely! Loved the singing-along times. Thank you for this."
Michaela
"That was such a special experience, thank you. You’ve listened so deeply with your whole being to the stone, and I appreciate so much attention and beauty and fun with which you’ve invited us to enter into this listening and share it with you. Thank you."
Joel Hooper, North Sea Thriving