Reviews & features: Reviews
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Dracula: Sex, Sucking and Stardom
17 Aug 2012
A thoroughly camp vamp
Jonathan Harker leaves his fiancée Mina to go to Transylvania, where he has some business to transact with the mysterious Count Dracula. When he gets there, he finds a jazz-handsy vamp obsessed with travelling to England and auditioning for Andrew Lloyd…
Clinton The Musical
17 Aug 2012
Ex-president inspires high-energy, catchy musical from talented ensemble
Former United States president Bill Clinton should offer any theatre production – let alone an all-singing, all-dancing musical – some great inspiration for material is a given. But, from his inauguration through to his sexual relations with ‘that…
Man 1 Bank 0
17 Aug 2012
Patrick Combs takes on the money men
Half the challenge of putting on a great show at the Fringe is about finding a great story, and Patrick Combs certainly has that. Better still, it’s true. A young man, with a sea of credit card debt, deposits a $95,093.35 junk mail cheque into his local…
Meine faire Dame - ein Sprachlabor
16 Aug 2012
Radical reimagining of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady gives much food for thought
Sitting down in the audience for Swiss director Christoph Marthaler's Meine faire Dame is something akin to entering a conversation class in a language you have no knowledge of. At first, it's completely baffling and you doubt you'll ever make sense of…
Confessions of a Grindr Addict
16 Aug 2012
Conspiratorial reminiscences and anecdotes make up this compelling take on dating in the modern age
Felix is getting ready to go out for a date, his first in ages. For a long time he’s relied on meeting guys via location-based gay dating app Grindr, for not much more than, well, you know. The thought of an actual date, with the boy right there in…
MacBeth in Scots
16 Aug 2012
Dark and unsettling new take on a classic
While referred to as ‘The Scottish Play’ in theatrical circles, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a tale of ruthless ambition and the rise and fall of a tyrant has never been adapted for, or performed in, Scots. Robin Lorimer’s new version, which gives the Bard’s…
Rémy
16 Aug 2012
Vivid Napoleonic re-imagining written and performed by talented Claire Gaydon
On the strength of this, the first show produced under the banner of newly formed theatre company Everything I Own, writer/performer Claire Gaydon is a talent to keep an eye on. Her historical drama, which unfolds in the aftermath of Napoleon’s reign of…
The Fantasist
16 Aug 2012
Imaginative treatment of mental health
The visionary-idealist-romantic of the title is a French woman named Louise who is tormented by her bipolar disorder. As the show opens we find Louise in a hospital in England where she is receiving treatment. She’s got a good, caring nurse and a dear…
Strong Arm
16 Aug 2012
Thought-provoking look at transformation and self-betterment
At the age of 13, Roland Poland weighs 20 stone. In his early 20s, he’s a muscle god, pumped up on four-hour gym sessions, hourly protein shakes and arcane shark’s fin supplements. But in breaking himself so that he can grow even stronger, has he lost…
Simple Matters
16 Aug 2012
Clowning around becomes a comedy of errors despite clear talent
This international troop of clowns present mime and physical comedy and, though skilled, grossly misread the audience to a less than comedic effect. Relying on 'volunteers', interaction that could work with a boozy, up-for-it Saturday night crowd comes…
Blurt - Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, Sun Jul 29 2012
15 Aug 2012
Poet, puppeteer and post-punk provocateur
In the silence, Ted Milton sits behind a microphone centre-stage and blows up a balloon he ties and places at his feet. With a set of carefully placed clips, Milton hangs up a piece of white material too big to be a handkerchief, too small to be a…
Archie Shepp - Summerhall, Edinburgh, 1 Aug 2012
15 Aug 2012
Avant-garde fire may be toned down, but 75-year-old Shepp still honks a mighty blues
'I continue to listen gamely to Archie Shepp (who is wearing a beard now) in the hope that one day it will all cease to sound like 'Flight of the Bumble Bee' scored for bagpipes and concrete-mixer' wrote Philip Larkin in 1966. One can relish the poet…
David Whitney – Struggling to Evolve
15 Aug 2012
Ill-conceived, unhappy show featuring cheap gags and little intelligence
Blasting his way onto the expectant stage with a hefty set of bagpipes, you could probably cite this loud start as the highlight of Whitney’s set. The tired-looking comedian immediately conceded (unnecessarily) that the bagpipes were a gimmick – before…
FNT Live presents … The Jingling Lane Family Singers
15 Aug 2012
Funny bits few and far between in ill-executed sketch comedy
At the start of this doomed sketch affair, there are more people on stage than in the crowd. Given that FNT Live features ten members, that’s not as cringeworthy as it might sound. The opening features an American family of fundamentalist Christian…
Fred MacAulay
15 Aug 2012
Persistently strong material and natural affability from Fringe institution
Now a firm Fringe institution, Fred MacAulay could coast by on easy charm alone. But that would never do, and even when he tackles well-trodden topics like air travel there's always the safe feeling that he'll have put in the graft for a proper big…
The Three Englishmen: Squares
15 Aug 2012
Gently amusing sketches could do with more pep to fulfil likeable lads' potential
The Three Englishmen – there’s four of them actually – aren’t blazing a new sketch comedy trail in in this show. But it’s a gently amusing hour with some stand out moments of hilarity, thanks primarily to their musical skills. The boys welcome us…
My Elevator Days
15 Aug 2012
Gentle play about old age and identity never loses sight of harsh reality
What do we leave behind in an ever-changing world? The old man in front of us will never get the 19 million Google results of Grace Kelly, with whom he shares a birthday, nor the blue plaque of the artist that goaded him as a child. Given his borderline…
Hand Over Fist
15 Aug 2012
Beautifully textured monologue about lost love and Alzheimer’s
Joanna Bending is devastatingly effective as Emily, an eerily child-like pensioner struggling to recount the events of her past as her memory of it slips away from her. In this one-woman show, Emily tells the story of a fateful night in the 1950s…
And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses
15 Aug 2012
This post-Apartheid era Zakes Mda adaptation has universal resonance
With its absurdist humour and metaphorical meaning, this clever, funny, political play is like a South African version of Waiting for Godot. As with Beckett’s luckless protagonists, two women (brilliantly played by South African comedians Hlengiwe…
Bruce Hammers' Bananapocalypse
15 Aug 2012
Gloriously chaotic hour that tumbles through fictitious film legend's career
Relative newcomer Mat Ewins 'stars' as Bruce Hammers, 1980's film legend best known for his seminal work the 1982 film Bananapocalypse. That's about as much as you get that's sensical about this show, it's a gloriously chaotic hour that tumbles through…
Poe’s Last Night
15 Aug 2012
Recitation of great works is strictly for Poe-heads
A self-professed work in progress, this one-man show is still not ready for public consumption. But isn't this sort of experimentation exactly what the Free Fringe should be doing? Dawn of the Dead actor David Crawford is not at his best as a rather…
Call Me!
15 Aug 2012
Accurate and amusing portrait of dating in the modern world
The interweaving lives and loves of three single girls and one new couple come together to create a scarily accurate portrait of dating in the modern world. Essentially split into two sections, there’s a interesting distinction between the early section…
Funk Rocket 5000
15 Aug 2012
Rachel Lancaster is brilliant in this off-kilter mental health comedy
The lights in the venue have blown – again – and the stage is cast in the sickly green glow of the emergency back-up. It couldn’t be better for this brilliantly bleak, bone-dry mental health comedy, which suggests the boundaries between patient and…
Tenderpits
15 Aug 2012
Uncomfortable and alienating autobiographical show
A man dressed in a Where's Wally-style hat and a huge, dirty nappy serves dinner to two teddy bears. Surprisingly, this is the most accessible scene in Anthony Johnston's willfully obscure one-man show. Tenderpits is ostensibly autobiographical but…
Unhappy Birthday
15 Aug 2012
Less a show than a mad Dadaist happening
‘It’s a party-slash-show-slash party!’ Such is Amy Lamé’s breathless refrain, which she repeats manically, with the excitement of an eight-year-old hopped up on Party Ring e-numbers. In fact, Unhappy Birthday is less a show than a mad Dadaist happening…
