Reviews & features: Issue 637

School for Scandal

School for vandals

RB Sheridan’s classic comedy has much to recommend it in our current era of vacuous celebrity tittle-tattle and grotesque self-interest. Yet the normally admirable Cal McCrystal’s production seems to have read the text so radically against what it seems…

Internal

Powerful, disarming exercise in human interaction

How much information are you comfortable revealing to a complete stranger? How long can you stare back at someone in a candlelit booth? What tells are you giving with your body language? Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed want to dig these answers…

One Eye Gone

Godzilla puppet adaptation loses something in translation

Unless you’re already familiar with Godzilla and the daikaiju genre, it might be hard to follow this re-imagining of the 1954 film – though its strength is in Katie Shook’s puppetry, not Erik Ehn’s storytelling. There’s imaginative use of concealed…

The World's Wife

Poetry in motion

There are some things in life that even a suspicious Fringe audience can trust in, and Linda Marlowe interpreting the poems of Carol Ann Duffy’s best-known collection is a double gold-star guarantee of quality. Marlowe is a phenomenal performer, and…

Nun the Wiser

Triona Adams picks up a new habit

Shows, TV programmes and novels about personal journeys are ten-a-penny at the moment (is there anywhere Dawn Porter hasn’t been?). Triona Adams leaving a media career to spend a year training to be a Benedictine nun because of a genuine spiritual…

The Year of the Horse

Frightening vision of a vacuous consumer society

The cartoonist, Harry Horse presented a haunting, gothic vision of contemporary Britain in the Sunday Herald in the year before his tragic and early death in January 2007. These bare facts and a few more are communicated by Tam Dean Burn before he…

Blondes

Denise has more fun

Blondes is exactly what you’d expect it to be like. Graham Norton on voiceover introduces Denise! Van! Outen! and with a razzle-dazzle and a boop-boop-be-doop she shimmies her way onto the stage, belts her way through hits from Dusty, Madonna, Britney…

Forgotten Things

Bittersweet, intelligent family farce

Suicidal teenager Toby, more-than-half-mad granny Lilly and manic, self-centred, bickering parents Philip and Margot form the spectacularly dysfunctional family at the centre of this bittersweet play. All of them have forgotten things, mainly how to…

Unit 46

Thin walls and solitary frustrations

This Australian two-hander visits the familiar territory of frustrated flat dwellers with a wrought examination of paranoid loner Tim and frustrated teacher Diane, living above and below each other in a claustrophobic unit block. Communicating only by…

Valery Ponomarev Quintet

Sharing A Global Language

JAZZ It’s late August, it’s The Jazz Bar, so it must be time for Valery Ponomarev. The hard-hitting Russian has been coming to Scotland on a regular basis since the early 90s, and this Fringe residence for Bill Kyle has become something of a staple…

Spaceman

Solar endurance test

This is the kind of show that divides audiences, in a Marmite love it or hate it kind of way. Clearly I fall into the latter category, because this one-man show felt like 45 minutes of slow torture. Performer Paul Rous of Aberdeenshire-based…

Jane Austen's Guide to Pornography

19th century literary superstar gives masterclass in romance

Despite the enduring popularity of her novels, 19th century literary superstar Jane Austen remains something of an enigma. Was she really the peevish, watchful stay-at-home spinster of popular imagination? Or did a truly passionate heart beat beneath…

Eric Bogle & John Munro

Bidding a Fond Farewell

FOLK In this Year of Homecoming, Scots-born singer and songwriter Eric Bogle is in the midst of a farewell to his homeland, having announced his intention to give up the touring game after this current excursion with fellow expat John Munro. Bogle…

Warren & Hanbury: All to Bare

Comedy sketch show in the flesh

These two small-town girls are a funny and smart comedy duo from Wales and Canada respectively, silly and sassy in perfect quantities and indeed willing to bare all (in the name of good humour, of course). They bring to Edinburgh sketches about lonely…

5 Questions: Kristen Schaal & Kurt Braunohler

What five words best describe your show? Encore performance of last year. Can you name a comic who should be more famous than they are now? Stewart Lee should be so famous and so in demand that he is no longer able to make personal appearances.

5 Questions: Helen Fitzgerald

Give us five words to describe My Last Confession? Menacing, funny, fast, twisted, gripping. Which authors should be more famous than they are now? I love the multiple layers in Kate Atkinson’s stories and think she should be even more famous…

Boys Noize

This is the biggest club event of this year’s Edge Festival as City is taken over by German electro producer Boys Noize (aka Alexander Ridha), a master of sparkling grooves that build to an epic electro-tech frenzy of acid squelches and heavy basslines.

Courtyard Readings

Hey! Yeah, you there, with the furrowed brow, the fistful of flyers and the crazed, distracted look. Listen, put down the Fringe Guide – it’s okay, just for an hour – and tuck yourself away in the soothing environs of the Scottish Poetry Library’s…

Frank Skinner

He may now be in his 50s, but there’s no real sign of Frank Skinner slowing up. The cheeky Midlands chappie has delivered his memoir of life back on the stand-up circuit, On the Road, and in this List-sponsored event you can expect the honesty and…

Baddaboom!

There are a number of exciting performances illuminating the themes of the Festival of Spirituality and Peace this year, but none quite so heart-stirring as Scotland’s own Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers. Look out for exhilarating rhythms, martial choreography…

The Last Witch - Rona Munro

Outside of panto season, it’s difficult to find a dramatist these days who’s keen to write about witches. While the idea of witchcraft might bring a certain primal frisson to some, and a sociological fascination to others, the contemporary theatre has…

Sharon Olds - American Literary Legend

It’s time to assess the sins of the father – and the mother. And there’s no one better to do so than one of America’s most influential poets, Sharon Olds, as famous for her tough stylistic swagger as her unflinching mind. Olds was born in 1942 and is…

Kursk - Submarine Drama

While Hollywood loves its war stories, theatre and the military have traditionally made uncomfortable bedfellows, if they’ve even got past first base at all. That began to change, certainly on the Fringe, after the invasion of Iraq. Over the past five…