Reviews & features: Reviews

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…

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…

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…

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.

Circus Oz: 30th Birthday Bash

Acrobatics with an Aussie accent

Characters in colourful costumes exchange banter with the audience, the live band plays a constant stream of Gogol Bordello-like polka and one act involves a dramatic take on Frankenstein's monster. This isn't your average circus. Far more theatrical…

Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores)

Théâtre du Soleil's debut production at the Edinburgh International Festival is a coup de théâtre

The first ever Edinburgh International Festival production by the great French company Théâtre du Soleil promised to be an unforgettable event. And so it proves. The brainchild of Théâtre du Soleil’s founder and director Ariane Mnouchkine, Les…

Bob and Jim - Go

Top-notch buffoonery and lecherous lookalikes

After indulging in some Modern Urges last time around, now the truly big and daft Bob and Jim are imploring us to Go. No doubt deliberately, this is a title which admittedly could be read in a couple of contrasting ways. These classically cockney gents…

Return of the Close Up Magician

Phenomenal close-hand tricks from a consummate performer

Close-hand magician Lewis Barlow is a likeable performer. Unlike Derren Brown and his ilk, Barlow creates a show where magic is not swamped by the overbearing personality of the performer, but rather one where magic takes the centre stage. Beginning…

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…

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…

The Girl With No Heart

Children's storybook on loss of innocence fails to come to life

The Girl with No Heart is based on a short story book written by performer Louisa Ashton. A children’s parable about the loss of innocence, Sparkle and Dark’s Travelling Players use puppetry, silhouettes and origami to narrate the tale of a girl who…

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…

Celia Pacquola

Laughing it up with a messed-up stand-up

Am I Strange? asks Australian comic Celia Pacquola at the top of her debut Fringe show which has done wonders at festivals back home. ‘Not especially’ might come the reply. Delightful, fragile and needy are more like the traits wrapped up into her stage…

Mumford and Sons

Furious energy from indie folk upstarts

The tiny cavern that is Cabaret Voltaire may not be the biggest of venues Edinburgh has to offer, but it’s still some fear for these still relative unknowns from London to sell-out two intense, sweaty nights in a row, especially considering the…

Craig Coulthard - Forest Pitch

Artist Coulthard creates a full-size football pitch in the Borders as part of the Cultural Olympiad

Craig Coulthard has certainly put the ‘beautiful’ in the beautiful game with Forest Pitch; a full-size football pitch created in the middle of a forest in the Scottish Borders. At the end of August two football matches were played on the pitch, the…

Wonderland

Vanishing Point investigation into dark erotic fantasies and internet porn is a huge disappointment

Vanishing Point's latest production finds the Glasgow-based theatre company in combative form, delving into internet pornography's seedy demi-monde and confronting audiences with their own desire for erotic titillation. Despite some stylish moments…

Hey, Piano Bar Lady!

Musical comedy taking it back to 80s New York via New Zealand

New Zealand singer Linn Lorkin is perched at her keyboard, tousled red hair, whimsical expression and billowing patchwork dress suggesting she’s quite the eccentric dame. Now in its second year at the Fringe, her one-woman biographical show is a…

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…

Lady Rizo

New York singer works Neil Gaiman, Dolly Parton and Edith Piaf into her hyper-feminine set

‘I was raised by hippies and rebelled with glamour,’ purrs Lady Rizo, a diva oozing old-school charisma. The New Yorker’s Fringe show is a riotous shindig squeezed into a ‘tiny Dutch circus tent’, her Grammy winning pipes swirling around retro, soulful…

David Trent - Spontaneous Comedian

Unoriginal, uncontroversial, unfunny

This schoolteacher has come to the Fringe with plenty of hype behind him but his multimedia Spontaneous Comedian is a befuddling affair. You know someone is in trouble when they constantly refer to jokes that usually get bigger laughs (slap on wrist…

Stewart Lee: Carpet Remnant World

Fringe veteran can still hurt stomachs

Stewart Lee’s 2012 Fringe kicked off in typically provocative vein, when his Guardian article (headlined ‘The Slow Death of the Edinburgh Fringe’) delivered an industry-savvy knee to the groin of corporate comedy promoters. While PRs dealt with the…

Celia Pacquola: Delayed

A quirksome loveable geekfest

In this, her third solo show at the Fringe, Aussie Celia Pacquola examines whether she has achieved anything in her move to the UK. It’s particularly pertinent as she left behind a long-term boyfriend, and whether they will stay together maintains some…

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…

Will Marsh's Ruination

Flawed but fearless dissection of the absurd

Britain is in a right old pickle and Will Marsh’s duty is to remind us how just bad things have got. For instance, there’s the problem with men being a bit dim and wholly unfaithful, what to do with having an awful regional accent (Marsh is an…

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…