Reviews & features: Edinburgh International Festival

Il Ritorno Di Ulisse In Patria

Austere, beautifully performed homecoming for a not-so-wily Ulysses

It's hard at first to know where to look on this stage. The story of Ulysses' return, as written by Monteverdi, is played out by puppets, but close behind them are their puppeteers, their heads only a few centimetres apart and a few centimetres larger…

The Yalta Game

Love story in duologue

The giddiness of love, as well as the dark cynicism that can sometimes undermine it, is a thematic concern to which Brian Friel’s work frequently returns. In this loose theatrical adaptation of Chekov’s short story ‘Lady with Lapdog’, we see an…

The Testament of Cresseid

Classic Scots poem, recited with a modest touch of theatre

If broad strokes of theatricality are to your taste this new translation of Robert Henryson’s 15th Century Scots riposte to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, directed by David Levine, might not be entirely to your taste. There’s a strong sense of the…

The Last Witch

Sensual story of power and the state

Beneath its bare story there’s something far more complex at work in Rona Munro’s new piece for the Traverse and the EIF. This re-imagining of the true, though factually sketchy, demise of Janet Horne, a Dornoch woman executed for witchcraft in 1727 and…

The Return of Ulysses

And they all lived happily ever after. But what happened next?

Homeric purists will be disappointed here. This is a tale of Penelope, not Ulysses, and it takes place almost entirely after the return of the hero – in narrative terms, after the end of the Odyssey. By the end of the scene one Ulysses has returned…

To tire of Londoners at the Edinburgh Fringe

Steve Cramer's Festival blog

After Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea, I went to the Assembly bar and drank the tea. I was contemplating which was the more indifferent drinking experience out of these two, when I was cheered by a chance meeting with Candida Benson, an actress whose own…

Gelabert Azzopardi Companyia de Dansa

Works of total theatre from Cesc Gelabert

Catalan choreographer, Cesc Gelabert is back at the Edinburgh International Festival after a five-year absence. He’s been missed, and the two new works he delivers in this double-bill show exactly why. These are works of total theatre, where music…

Dance hitlist

Everything Must Go, Flhip Flhop: Everything Happens on the Break, Michael Clark, Scottish Ballet, Zeitgeist

Scottish Ballet

Three diverse works from our national ballet company, all of which will put these increasingly powerful dancers to the test. Reportedly his own personal favourite, Sir Frederick Ashton’s Scenes de Ballet opens the night with style and sophistication.

Let's Dance: Michael Clark Company

With Bowie on the soundtrack, Clark's new work is the flagship show of the EIF's dance programme

When you’re the closest thing the dance world has to a household name, every word you say, work you create and mistake you make is documented and kept for posterity. Despite turning 47 in June, Michael Clark is still dogged by the term ‘enfant…

Tragic endeavours: Staatsoper Stuttgart’s Actus Tragicus

Lifting the lid on one of the EIF's must-sees

Actus Tragicus. A presentation of tragedy. With that title, Stuttgart Opera’s production is hardly going to be a bundle of laughs. Yet, the sheer beauty of the Bach cantatas, which lie at the heart of this highly unusual synthesis of music and drama…

Hitlist: Festival music

What to see this week

Pokey La Farge, Actus Tragicus, Magazine, Maria Tecce, Malinky, Camille O'Sullivan, Air Alba

Faust

Dark, thrilling and unsettling adaptation of Goethe’s classic

Surely one of the Edinburgh International Festival’s most ambitious projects, Silviu Purcarete’s grand adaptation of Faust takes over, and fills, the huge warehouse space at Ingleston’s Royal Highland Centre. Based on Goethe’s treatment of the German…

Lee Breuer on Peter and Wendy

The Mabou Mines director discusses bringing his critically acclaimed play to the EIF

Mabou Mines’ innovative, bittersweet adaptation of JM Barrie’s fantastic tale is brought to vivid life by performer Karen Kandel and seven puppeteers, accompanied by Johnny Cunningham’s original musical score, played live on stage by a seven piece band.

The Generation Game: Douglas Coupland

18 years after his breakthrough, the Generation X author, provides us with a sequel. Of sorts.

Fans and critics have known it was coming for months, with rumour and misinformation clogging up chat rooms and columns. Now that Generation A is finally set to be unleashed upon the reading public, we’ll see if the furious debate will have been…

Admeto Re’di Tessaglia

Getting a handle on Handel

Scorned lovers, jealous tantrums and furious outbursts are all in a day’s work for conductor Nicholas McGegan. As he explains, ‘There’s not a great deal of difference between opera and soap opera – they are all about love, jealously and ambition.…

Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich

American soprano is mobbed, but not in the mob

Dawn Upshaw is up to her elbows in batter. She’s in the kitchen of her New York home, making pancakes with her son. It’s a very domestic scene, but then the American soprano couldn’t be further from the diva-ish stereotype. She’s just returned from the…

David Levin talks The Testament of Cresseid

The Israeli director discusses adapting Burns for the stage

Robert Burns might be the subject of many Homecoming events this year, but Jonathan Mills’ decision to focus on the lesser-known Scottish poet Robert Henryson as part of the Edinburgh International Festival’s 2009 programme could prove a rewarding one.

Hitlist: Theatre

Our pick of the week's theatre

Faith Healer, The Yalta Game, Afterplay, The Overcoat, Controlled Falling Project, The Hotel, The Tartuffe/The Trial, Trilogy

Hitlist: Visual art

Our pick of visual art for the week

Scottish Paintings: Old Masters to Contemporary. Milestone, The Creative World of Alan Davie, Jane and Louis Wilson: Unfolding the Aryan Papers, The Enlightenments, The Discovery of Spain, Eva Hesse: Studiowork

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Steve Cramer's Festival blog

There’s a paradox to being a reviewer. On the one hand, one is constantly badgered by theatre companies to see their shows, and on the other, when you arrive at their venues, they won’t let you in. Colonel Blood had easier access to the crown jewels…

Optimism

Lazy and ill thought out stage version of Voltaire’s Candide

While still at an impressionable age, Candide comes under the influence of a forceful teacher with an inclination to the philosophical, and meanders out into life convinced that ‘Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. Whatever…

Diaspora

Beautiful music, grand multimedia, but where’s the beef?

The uncertainty about identity imposes itself upon people whose origins lie somewhere other than where they live creates the central focus for Ong Ken Sen’s Diaspora. Its exploration of tensions between new worlds and old through a series of stories…

Faith Healer

Faith, fate and chance

The Gate Theatre’s opening piece in its Brian Friel mini-festival for the EIF is perhaps that author’s most complex and admired play. Its significances are so myriad that dozens of critical appraisals have attempted to fathom out its meaning. But the…

Royal Ballet of Flanders

The last time this dynamic company was in Edinburgh, they were performing William Forsythe’s off-kilter, Impressing The Czar. Two years later, the Royal Ballet of Flanders is back with another impressively unconventional work, The Return of Ulysses.