Reviews & features
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…
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…
Batsheva Dance Company: Hora
19 Aug 2012
Learning the new language of dance
For most of us, the word ‘gaga’ means one of two things: an anthemic, hands-in-the-air Queen song, or a peroxide blonde dressed in meat. At Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, however, it has a whole other meaning. The brainchild of Israeli artistic…
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…
Russia's Mariinsky Ballet bring Cinderella to Edinburgh International Festival
19 Aug 2012
Five reasons why you shouldn't miss it
The company You might know them as the Kirov, but back home they’re called the Mariinsky Ballet, and this St Petersburg-based troupe is widely recognised as being one of the finest classical ballet companies in the world. The choreographer A former…
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…
