Reviews & features: Edinburgh Festivals
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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…
Richard Milward on karma and a girl called Kimberly
19 Aug 2012
The writer reads from latest book at the Faber Social Unbound event in Charlotte Square
‘One of the best books I’ve ever read about being young, working class and British,’ said Irvine Welsh of Richard Milward’s 2007 debut, Apples. The 27-year-old followed it with Ten Storey Love Song (2009), a riotous tale of tower-block living written in…
Ballet Preljocaj: And then, one thousand years of peace
19 Aug 2012
Radical re-imagining of the Book of Revelation
'Revolution and revelation' are two of the themes Angelin Preljocaj cites in his radical re-working of St John's Apocalypse, a piece that beguiles both with the changing textures of its movement and the surreal beauty of its images, set to a scorching…
Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company - Uncharted Seas/Timeless
19 Aug 2012
Kathak dance travels from tradition to timelessness
A journey through time and space, Aditi Mangaldas' double-bill travels through the traditions of Kathak north Indian dance -- with its origins in storytelling -- to emerge spinning into the 21st century, in two pieces that connect the early temple…
Gulliver's Travels
19 Aug 2012
Savage and funny adaptation of Swift’s satire
The Victorians considered Gulliver's Travels a kid's book, chortling at the notion of a big man in a tiny world and quietly omitting Gulliver's horrified realisation that the bestial Yahoos are in fact human. That uncomfortable final part of the book is…
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…
Visual artist and filmmaker Katri Walker discusses her career so far
19 Aug 2012
Walker is a fan of Salla Tykkä, Francis Alÿs and being referred to in the third person
What was the first exhibition you went to see? I don’t remember what the first one was but sprinting through the Hermitage in St Petersburg as a teenager with my brother in a valiant yet futile attempt to see as many of the three million plus artworks…
Robert MacFarlane at Edinburgh Book Festival with The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
19 Aug 2012
Finding a calling in nature writing
A new generation of authors is bringing an incredible range of skills to nature writing: literary style, social observation, memoir, geology, cartography and psychology amongst them. All of which can be found in Robert Macfarlane’s remarkable third…
John Gordon Sinclair on taking the plunge into crime fiction
19 Aug 2012
Actor discusses debut novel Seventy Times Seven at Edinburgh Book Festival
On approaching your first novel after decades spent working in another industry, it stands to reason that your job will influence the writing. It makes sense then that John Gordon Sinclair’s debut, Seventy Times Seven, has a cinematic quality to it…
Award-winning journalist James Meek to speak at Edinburgh Book Festival
19 Aug 2012
Meek will speak on his upcoming novel and the importance of book festivals
James Meek’s upcoming novel, The Heart Broke In, is billed as ‘a seductive drama full of scandal, dilemmas, love and sacrifice’. Coupled with his previous form, the acclaimed The People’s Act of Love and We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, the Charlotte…
Husband and wife graphic novel team Bryan and Mary M Talbot - interview
19 Aug 2012
The pair collaborated on Dotter of Her Father's Eyes
‘I think we’re living in the golden age of the graphic novel,’ explains veteran comics artist and writer Bryan Talbot, whose art has graced the pages of 2000AD, Batman and Sandman. ‘Every major literary festival has something on graphic novels these…
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…
Lavinia Greenlaw set for Edinburgh International Book Festival date
19 Aug 2012
Poetry collection The Casual Perfect addresses getting older
At 49, Lavinia Greenlaw is hardly ancient, but her thoughts turn to the experience of getting older in her most recent collection of poetry, The Casual Perfect. ‘I wondered for years, thinking, if the casual perfect were a tense, what would it be? Then…
Interview: Stuart MacBride - author of Birthdays for the Dead
19 Aug 2012
Author at Edinburgh International Book Festival with a serial killer book
Give us five words to describe Birthdays for the Dead? Dark, Dark, Dark, Dark, and Dark. Seriously, it’s a very dark book in the classical noir tradition, rather than the ‘Tartan Noir’ marketing sense. Which author should be more famous than they…
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…
