Rose McGowan: Planet 9 review: 'She can hold a note – but not always the right one'

You can understand why Rose McGowan might want to leave this planet behind her. She grew up in and then fled a cult, fell into the arms of another cult (as she describes Hollywood), survived sexual assault and endured the abuse that came with leading the #MeToo campaign against it. Small wonder she created a place to take refuge: Planet 9, where orbs shimmer and we’re all free to become our best and most beautiful selves. But on the basis of her new show, one doubts whether many will come along for the ride.

The show and album that take us there were created alongside her memoir, Brave. The latter gave vent to her anger; the former is more optimistic. “We don’t have to be so earthbound in our thinking,” McGowan tells us, barefoot and stately in a white Grecian robe. This “visuals, spoken word and singing” show features tracks from her album with video she has made herself, spliced into a sermon about escaping our psychological shackles and realising our potential to be free. “Not to sound like a Californian hippy”, she says at one point. That is exactly how she sounds.

Which isn’t a problem in itself: Californian hippies have plenty to teach us. But McGowan seldom escapes their most cliched expressions. “Take my hand / Sail in air / On solar flares,” she speak-sings to ambient electronica, while blissed-out visuals pulse and swirl onscreen. Her voice is strong but wayward: she can hold a note, but it doesn’t always sound like the right one.

It’s frustrating, because I’d guess the real McGowan, the one she relaxes into when she’s not being her best, astral self, is more entertaining company. We get fleeting glimpses: the odd sardonic laugh or frank aside. More often – wafting around like a refugee from 1970s sci-fi – she’s stilted: words blandly intoned, hands curiously rigid like the astral winds changed direction while she was doing yoga.

This is clearly a meaningful project for her, one that has helped her survive, she says, the last three traumatic years. Good luck to her. But audiences might prefer more earthly pleasures.

• At Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, until 18 August.

• Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews