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Paperbelle
20 Aug 2012
Imaginative fun for the very young
Creating a show that straddles the fine line between engaging a pre-schooler, and not scaring them, isn’t easy. Harder still to capture the imagination of the grown-up whose lap they’re sitting on or next to. Yet with this delicate, sweet and funny…
Matthew Crosby
20 Aug 2012
Slightly stilted affair from an otherwise very funny man
Given the majesty of this year’s main Pappy’s show, we can surely forgive Matthew Crosby (the small, bespectacled, beardy one of the trio) if he’s not firing on the same number of cylinders that powered his 2011 solo debut. Even so, he is able to…
Felicity Ward: The Hedgehog Dilemma
20 Aug 2012
High-speed hour of breathless laughs from charismatic comedienne
One way to freshen up material about relationships is to frame it in a cute thought experiment. Imagine two hedgehogs getting ready for winter. Do they cuddle together, and risk hurting each other with their spines? Or do they sit apart, not getting…
Beats
20 Aug 2012
Tremendous recreation of rave culture
Tremendous recreation of rave culture In 1994 the UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act outlawed gatherings of more than 100 people with a soundtrack of ‘amplified music characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. In the…
Carl Donnelly: Different Gravy
20 Aug 2012
A tickling rather than side-splitting hour from home-made autobiography writer
Carl Donnelly is a nice guy. Beginning his routine with a slide-show (before he gets on stage) of his home-made autobiography cover and jokey snaps of family and friends, it’s clear that here is someone not afraid to take the piss out of himself, never…
Uninvited
20 Aug 2012
Ambitious production fails to spring to life
Our unnamed protagonist, obsessed by order and routine, returns home from work to discover a stranger in his house. So he makes him a cup of tea. But that’s the least of his worries: the talking wallpaper seems to have opinions on everything, and his…
Guardian Reader
20 Aug 2012
Liberal leftie humour from William Hammer-Lloyd
The anonymous reader is a tall, lanky, floppy-haired, bearded, liberal, leftie, upper-middle class intellectual and former teacher. In other words, he’s the archetypal reader of the newspaper affectionately known as The Grauniad. Having become all too…
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…
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…
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…
