Reviews & features: Edinburgh Festival Fringe
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Uninvited
20 Aug 2012
Ambitious production fails to spring to life
Our unnamed protagonist, obsessed by order and routine, returns home from work to discover a stranger in his house. So he makes him a cup of tea. But that’s the least of his worries: the talking wallpaper seems to have opinions on everything, and his…
Guardian Reader
20 Aug 2012
Liberal leftie humour from William Hammer-Lloyd
The anonymous reader is a tall, lanky, floppy-haired, bearded, liberal, leftie, upper-middle class intellectual and former teacher. In other words, he’s the archetypal reader of the newspaper affectionately known as The Grauniad. Having become all too…
John Conway - The New Conway Dimension
20 Aug 2012
Small and daft is the order of the day in Conway's semi-anarchic routines
If you find yourself tiring of the slick, professional, often identikit comedians in town, you should cop a load of Australia’s John Conway. With laptop-wielding sidekick Michael Burke trying his utmost to keep proceedings reasonably on track, Conway…
Boris and Sergey’s Vaudevillian Adventure
20 Aug 2012
Droll and bawdy puppet double act
Droll and bawdy puppet double act Nothing covers cracks like cuteness. Boris and Sergey are two faceless leather bunraku puppets that look like reconstituted old footballs sprung to life. They speak in gravelly Russian honks and have more than enough…
Out of the Blue
20 Aug 2012
All-male a cappella group radiate charm with formidable vocals and infectious stage presence
Before a 500-strong, sold-out Saturday house, 15 young men shimmy onto a lights-down, mist-shrouded stage, to be greeted thunderously from what seems to be most of the visiting female population of Edinburgh. Out of the Blue is back. In their…
Steve Shanyaski’s Life-Survival Bible
20 Aug 2012
Perfectly pleasant jokes masking an aimless set-up
Shanyaski is an all-guns-blazing kinda guy, barrelling onstage and wasting no time ingratiating himself to a late-night crowd. His is a show, he promises, that will help the hapless sods among us to navigate the challenges of everyday life, his…
And They Played Shang-a-Lang
20 Aug 2012
Bay City Rollers jukebox musical is boisterous good fun
If a semi-autobiographical jukebox musical about salad days in Scotland sounds grim -- and it should -- Derek Douglas’ nostalgia fest is surprisingly good fun. Local amateur company Craft Theatre’s 15-strong cast perform with such gusto and evident…
Colin Mars: A Life Full of Lemons
20 Aug 2012
Over-egged and unoriginal fare
Life may have given Mars his fair share of lemons, but instead of making lemonade, a yawnworthy theme he continually comes back to, he's squeezed the metaphorical citrus dry leaving nothing but a sour pulp. Nervous and sweaty, the three-strong audience…
Giddy Goat
20 Aug 2012
Hilltop musical fails to scale the heights
Growing up on a mountain side, the eponymous goat is too young and timid to jump off a rock, until he’s called upon to rescue a stranded sheep, and discovers his hero within. Jamie Rix’s picture book adapts well for the stage, and there’s certainly no…
Pappy's: Last Show Ever!
19 Aug 2012
An hour of undiluted joy
First rule of comedy reviewing: never sit in the front row with a big notepad on your knee, scribbling away without a care in the world. Sometimes it’s not easy to get a spot where you can remain in the shadows and utterly anonymous but in a venue as…
Sam Simmons - About the Weather
19 Aug 2012
Noisy ‘play’ fails to do Aussie comic justice
Imagine a shouty hybrid of the horror movie Videodrome and that creepy old record ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ and you have a fairly accurate idea of Sam Simmons’ play-within-a-Fringe-comedy, About the Weather. ‘It’s going to be weird for an hour,’ roars the…
Children's shows from Scotland at 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe
19 Aug 2012
Shows from Catherine Wheels, Frozen Charlotte, Le Petit Monde and more
It’s great to have so many visiting companies at the Fringe, but just for a moment, we’re going to celebrate the home-grown Scottish talent right on our doorstep The Ballad of Pondlife McGurk One of Scotland’s finest children’s theatre companies…
Angels
19 Aug 2012
Powerful monologue with a stunning central performance
Save for a single hanging strip-light, the studio space at the Traverse is so utterly bare that you begin to suspect the audience has been the victim of a cruel practical joke. But then actor Iain Robertson appears and strikes up the opening passages of…
An Appointment with the Wicker Man
19 Aug 2012
A populist comedy success from Greg Hemphill, Donald McLeary and Vicky Featherstone
Of course the idea of a musical version of acclaimed horror movie The Wicker Man is absurd. That’s pretty much the point of the National Theatre of Scotland’s play-within-a-play from writers Greg Hemphill and Donald Mcleary and director Vicky…
Sammy J & Randy - The Inheritance
19 Aug 2012
Triumph of style over substance
Yes, it’s funny that a purple puppet might swear and drink and smoke. And it’s probably amusing that he would hang out with a socially inadequate skinny nerd. But once you get used to those facts, and have nodded in admiration at the production values…
Taylor Glenn - Reverse Psycomedy
19 Aug 2012
Playing mind games with her crowd
There can’t be too many Fringe comedy shows (ie zero) that casually drop in phrases such as ‘cognitive behaviour’, ‘Gestalt theory’ or ‘psychodynamic therapy’. But then, not many Fringe comedians will have worked for eight years as a professional…
Gareth Morinan
19 Aug 2012
Slim pickings amid a frenzy of facts
Quite a busy boy is Gareth Morinan given that he has seven different shows at the Fringe including political debates, a bit of improv and spoken word events in which he speaks out about his opinions on David Cameron and Ricky Gervais (he’s not a fan of…
The Not Quite Quartet
19 Aug 2012
High fives and top tunes
If you have yet to make your way through The Wire or somehow haven’t yet seen Fight Club or The Sixth Sense or Citizen Kane, best take some earplugs with you to The Not Quite Quartet. ‘The Spoiler Song’ does exactly what it says in the title but it…
La Clique Royale - The Queen’s Selection
19 Aug 2012
A night out with the bawdy and the beautiful
Meet the cast of freaks and uniques who gather nightly inside the wooden walls of the Spiegeltent, bathed in red lamplight, for a cabaret show with a couple of dark twists. There’s Agent Lynch – doing a sort of ‘Heidi does Carry On’ turn involving tiny…
Sam Fletcher - Good on Paper
19 Aug 2012
Weird and wacky mix of magic and music
There has been a surge in self-deprecating geeky comics over the last few years, reflecting a kind of postmodern twist of fate. Being a nerd has become cool, and Sam Fletcher’s weird and wacky show – a mix of crude magic, flipchart proposals and ‘dad…
Chris Ramsey
19 Aug 2012
Warm tales from a hugely charismatic performer
Quite why Chris Ramsey is so surprised by his popularity, it’s hard to tell. A nominee of last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award, he cannot believe his luck and claims to be having the time of his life. This concept of good fortune forms the basis of his…
Alexis Dubus: Cars & Girls
19 Aug 2012
Too much of a good thing
This exuberant English comedian is too clever for his own good. Alexis Dubus’ new show draws upon some seriously crazy travel adventures he’s undertaken, including a trip to – and at – the psychedelic Burning Man Festival in the American desert. What…
How to Start a Riot
19 Aug 2012
Nifty political piece that fizzes with questions and ideas
Mark Duggan’s death at the hands of the police sparked last summer’s riots: four days of violent disorder and looting all over the country. But, as Worklight Theatre point out, sparks don’t catch without fuel and flames don’t spread without…
James Acaster
19 Aug 2012
Brings joy to surreal and eccentric comedy
A criticism levelled at James Acaster over the last couple of years is that his material has been somewhat puerile. He’s been tipped as a young comedian with real potential but still in need of much improvement, something far from the truth in this…
Songs of Lear
17 Aug 2012
A sublime version of the Bard’s tragedy, in its purest form
Imagine King Lear in pill form, the Shakespearean equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum. Or contained in a single firework. What about Lear: the new fragrance from Christian Dior? Baffling as this all sounds, it’s pretty much what…
