Reviews & features: International Festival

Boxing clever a wise move for sons of privilege

Steve Cramer's Festival Blog

The lizard ails! As the Fringe moves on apace, and one enters into the strange, Through the Looking Glass world of sweaty venues, crowded pubs, dreadful hacks and appalling luvvies, one’s domestic arrangements seem a distant and desperately pined for…

Theatre Hitlist

As the EIF joins the Fringe, we choose our pick of Festival theatre.

Diaspora, Sea Wall, The Tartuffe, Trilogy, The Hotel, Party, White Tea, Optimism, Faust

Top 20 Festival Shows

Emmanuel Jal There are few people who could even imagine the terrors of being a child made to fight in a war-torn homeland. This guy has lived it and come through the other side. Jen Hadfield In a year of poetry shocks, this Shetlands-based…

Music Hitlist

What to go see this week

GRV three-day music festival, The Juan McLean, Young Fathers and Unicorn Kid, Scotland at Night, St Kilda, Broken Records

Bach at Greyfriars

Europe’s finest converge for Johann Sebastian

In Jonathan Mills’ third Edinburgh International Festival programme, the highly successful early evening slots he has established at Greyfriars Kirk are focused this time round on the music of one composer – JS Bach. Across eight hand-picked top…

Optimism - Things can only get better

Frank Woodley tells Mark Fisher why Optimism is the feelgood hit of the summer

This time last year Frank Woodley was mucking in with the Fringe’s finest as he brought his solo show Possessed to the Assembly Rooms. It was much the same as it had been for the best part of 20 years for the rubber-limbed Australian comic, a Fringe…

Five festival over-achievers

Robin Ince One can only assume that Robin Ince sits in a thick blue funk for that small portion of the day when he isn’t A) hosting a ‘lunchtime celebration of science and the wonderful’, B) being a ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ or C) opposing ‘the moral…

Made in Scotland

The soul of Scotland in music

A favourite of youth orchestras at the Fringe, Peter Maxwell Davies’ An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise makes it to the main EIF stage for the first time as part of an orchestral programme celebrating music made in Scotland. The only piece in the Festival…

Dub Syndicate

Sci-fi wall wobblers

Anyone who witnessed former Pop Group vocalist Mark Stewart with ex-Sugarhill house band The Maffia play Edinburgh last year with seminal producer and On-U Sound head honcho Adrian Sherwood manning the controls will probably still be wondering where on…

I Went To The House But I Did Not Enter

Musical reflection of literary masters

There has been no shortage of theatre that examines the disaffection and atomisation of modern life over the last century, but it’s less common to find a piece that selects four noted 20th century authors to explore the theme, then translates their work…

Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray

Effective storytelling makes for an adaptation with impact

In the closing moments of Dorian Gray, a bright light shines out into the audience, temporarily blinding us. Something most people aren't used to, but those who spend their life in the spotlight are all too familiar with. It's this -- the trappings of…

365

Magical reflection on children in care

The idea of a play about children in care might not immediately strike you as the an entertaining festival night out, but overcome your prejudices. Vicky Featherstone’s production of David Harrower’s script for the NTS touches upon the issues that…

Devil's Ship

Intriguing, atmospheric Iranian chiller

This Iranian story, with a lurking subtext of supernatural horror, performed in Farsi with English subtitles by Bazi Theatre Company, features a group of women in a claustrophobic emotional vacuum. While the women rely on custom to get them through the…

Regal king size

Karol Szymanowski considered himself an outsider which is why he identified with Sicily’s King Roger II and why his opera has become a gay favourite, finds Carol Main The Edinburgh International Festival’s staged opera programme is swinging from one…

Class enemy

Heavy-handed adaptation

Haris Pasovic’s production of Class Enemy for Bosnian company East West retains the central theme of Nigel Williams’ 1978 play - the desperate need for nurturing among young people neglected by an under-funded education system - to powerful effect. Yet…

Budapest Festival Orchestra

Folk and gypsy influence evident in programme of two concerts

Starting off with a programme inspired by gypsy music and Hungarian folk melodies, the Budapest Festival Orchestra give two full orchestral concerts in the last week of the Festival plus two presented by some of their soloists. Featuring some rather…

Jerusalem Quartet

Globally renowned Israeli foursome make their EIF debut

Making its Edinburgh International Festival debut, the Jerusalem Quartet is the final string quartet to appear at this year’s impressive Queen’s Hall series. Performing in the wake of the Ysaÿe, Belcea and Pavel Haas quartets, the quartet is, says EIF…

Looking at Tazieh

Fascinating filmed version of millennium-old Persian drama

This video installation by Abbas Kiarostami renders into real emotion a filmed version of Tazieh a millennium-old form of Persian drama enacted annually to commemorate and grieve the loss of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammed. But the felt…

4.48 Psychosis

Painful journey into despair

Having seen Grzegorz Jarzyna's mesmerising production of this Sarah Kane play on the intimate stage of TR Warszawa in Poland, I was concerned the playwright's sad mediation on suicide would lose its intensity on the bigger stage of the King's. I needn't…