Reviews & features: Reviews

Stonewall

Doubtless huge progress has been made regarding gay rights in recent decades but there are still reports of gay people being persecuted across the world.

Oh, the Humanity and Other Good Intentions

Marvellous quintet of short plays with excellent performances

Marvellous quintet of short plays with excellent performances Isn’t self-consciousness a ball-ache? It ups the ante, rather, as if all eyes are on you and you’re barely making sense, let alone delivering the goods, and you still haven’t found what…

Thread

Poignant site-specific evocation of life and loss

After the success of last year’s Allotment, Nutshell Theatre returns with an immersive evocation of nostalgia, memory and love as the forces that bind us together in the second part of their thematic trilogy. The audience is invited to the Burntisland…

Edinburgh Art Festival surrealist exhibition Another World leaves potential unfulfilled

Impressive, if surprisingly straightforward, collection of surrealist works

For a source so rich in departures for radical flights of enquiry, this presentation of surrealist paintings, objects, journals and sculptures is alarmingly straightforward. By marrying a host of mesmerising works by the likes of Dali and Magritte to a…

After the Rainfall

Ambitious multi-layered show that bears repeat viewing

A young British diplomat makes a desperate bid to get home from Suez in the 1950s. Thirty years later, a Cumbrian art student creates a memorial to a trapped miner. An Egyptian backpacker struggles across Europe, and an ant expert releases an explosive…

Jungle Book: The Next Chapter

Monkeying around with Kipling’s classic

Rudyard Kipling’s fables are part of the collective national psyche, so this follow-up from Glenn Elston and the Australian Shakespeare Company has a lot to live up to. The story picks up when Mowgli, now grown, returns to the jungle to visit Baloo.

Laura Solon

Impressive but patchy follow-up to almighty glory

When Laura Solon first burst into the Fringe psyche in 2005, it was under the most trying of circumstances. Having just split from her comedy partner, she had two months to come up with a completed script. That show, Kopfraper’s Syndrome, won her the…

The Trench

Pitch-perfect evocation of the theatre of war

Les Enfants Terribles have built a formidable reputation for playfully macabre tales mixing drama, music and inventive staging to create gothic fantasies reminiscent of Tim Burton’s oeuvre. The latest from the company’s writer Oliver Lansley draws on…

Revolting Rhymes

Lively rendition of Roald Dahl tales

The two performers at the helm of this manic hour may be young (one of them had just received their A Level results the day I saw them) but already they’ve honed considerable performance skills. Not only that, they’ve also amassed a considerable…

Laura Solon: The Owl of Steven

A curious show about owls and oddballs

It seems like a very long time ago since Laura Solon popped up to Edinburgh with a hastily rewritten show and astonished the comedy world by walking away with the last ever Perrier Award. Five years on and Solon is getting into her stride with narrative…

Unmythable

Infectiously energetic trio enthralls kids and adults alike in hour-long sprint through classical my

The action opens on the Argot where an overly zealous Jason, and his less competent shipmates, is on his way to fight the man-eating dragon that never sleeps and claim the golden fleece in order to prove himself to be a hero. Along the way, the…

The List

Maureen Beattie delivers this bleakly poignant dramatic monologue from Stellar Quines

In 1916, American playwright Susan Glaspell wrote a one-act piece, Trifles, about two women using their intimate knowledge of the domestic sphere to hide clues right under the noses of a group of men investigating a murder. It may be nearly a century…

Bound

Anarchic trip to California derails early on

A young lad, his innocent girlfriend and estranged father are trapped inside a freight train. What was meant to be an anarchic trip to California has turned into an indefinite prison sentence. It sounds like the ideal ingredients for an intensely…

Rime

Square Peg astonish with daring and precision in riveting Coleridge circus

Contemporary circus, or nouveau cirque – a genre which combines circus acrobatics with a narrative or theme – is a genre more established in continental Europe than here in the UK. It is fascinating, therefore, to see London-based company Square Peg…

Hi-kick

Thrilling fusion of football, dance and slapstick

Virtuoso soccer skills have become a staple of telly variety shows like Britain’s Got Talent. But when was the last time you witnessed a five-a-side football match recreated on stage, with multiple balls flying in every direction? While this show from…

Time for Fun

Russian troupe prove handy when it comes to dance

It’s the hands rather than the feet that do the dancing in this original show from St Petersburg-based Hand Made Theatre. With nothing but rolled up sleeves, white gloves and a well-timed UV light to aid them, the ensemble create patterns, puppets and…

Pete Johansson

Bear necessities from crack Canadian

It seems that in Pete Johansson’s Utopian Crack Pipe, there’s less of the crack and more of the bear. The plaudits that have adorned the Canadian since his debut Fringe show was nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Newcomer Award in 2009 have once again…

The Boat Factory

Poignant, moving evocation of a lost way of life

If you don’t think a play about a shipyard sounds like your kind of thing, think again. This moving two-hander by Dan Gordon, performed by Belfast’s Happenstance theatre company, is a real gem, at once an evocation of the city’s Harland and Wolff boat…

BUG Hosted by Adam Buxton

Entertaining but unchallenging music video presentation

The usually BFI-based BUG organisation’s remit is to celebrate ‘global creativity in music video’, and in that respect, this show succeeds admirably. Videos from acts as diverse as US indie-rockers Manchester Orchestra, electro artists The Chase and…

Danny Pensive’s Map of Britain

Wonderfully odd character comedy

This character comedy is so assured, odd and sweet, that you can easily see the self-styled Sunderland simpleton becoming the next score keeper on Shooting Stars. During his whistle-stop recollection of a three-year trip around Britain, Pensive…

Dream Pill

Poignant insight into the unsettling reality of sex work in the UK

Produced by Clean Break and based on real experiences, this minimalist performance focuses on two young girls trafficked from Nigeria. The two actresses adopt child-like language and mannerisms to provide a poignant insight into the unsettling reality…

Giacinto Palmieri

This stilted performance was a pile of sweaty meatballs

Due to Palmieri’s comically strong Italian accent and the manic whirring of several fans, it was hard to determine precisely how funny this gentle narrative about nationality and language was or wasn’t. Respect to the man for his charm, and attempting…

Peter Blake: Venice

Poptabulous exhibition of screenprints inspired by La Dominante

When Art went POP!, Peter Blake defined a very British view of how the 60s swung. Collaging trash iconography with pop star royalty, all involved were bestowed with mutually acquired cult credibility. Forty-odd years on from Sergeant Pepper, the…

Nude

Non-gratuitous meanderings for art’s sake

Don’t worry, there is no gratuitous nudity in Nude, just two actors flexing and posing their naked bodies in close proximity to the front row. But it’s all done in the name of art, and the context of a life drawing class, in which the reluctant audience…

Polaris

Poignant Czech mime

This drama of two men lost in the Antarctic is in danger of giving mime a good name. Using very few props, a howling soundtrack and jumping between human and animal, Vojta Svejda and Jan Benes-McGadie relate their impressionistic story with winning…