Reviews & features: Theatre, Issue 582

Damascus

Routines based on the business of translation are a pretty well precedented source of humour in the theatre. What gives a rare quality to David Greig’s new play, which amounts to an entire two-and -a-half hours of this schtick, is the subtlety and…

Long Time Dead

‘On this proud and beautiful mountain we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and have really been men. It is hard to return to servitude.’ With these words, French climber Lionel…

ENGLAND

Tim Crouch, who has built a strong reputation at the Fringe with his shows My Arm and An Oak Tree has seemed a guaranteed banker in the months since this year’s show was announced. And this piece is worth the wait. It involves Crouch and performer…

The Last South: Pursuit of the Pole

Between 1910 and 1912 two competing teams, one British one Norwegian, set out to become the first men to reach the South Pole. Only one managed to return home to tell the tale. Constructed from the diaries kept by the British explorer Captain Robert…

Exits and Entrances

In Athol Fugard’s insightful new play, we find celebrated South African actor Andre Huguenet (Morlan Higgins) reflecting on all that he has sacrificed for his theatre career which is now reaching its end.

Life in a Marital Institution

There can be few more engaging acts on this year’s Fringe than James Braly. There’s a winning, self effacing smile, mixed with the occasional giggle throughout his performance, and despite the, at times, emotionally harrowing subject matter, Braly…

Hitlist: Theatre

• Damascus David Greig’s play will be the toast of the Fringe. A comedy of manners set in the city of the title, the piece involves a Scot on a business visit, and the effects of his cultural assumptions on those he encounters. See review, page 79.

Venus as a Boy

In this intriguing and highly emotional adaptation of Luke Sutherland’s award winning novel, adaptor and actor Tam Dean Burn plays a dying rent boy who claims he is turning to gold. Burn, accompanied by Sutherland, who provides a riveting electrical…

Forgotten Voices

The idea that war can be glorious has long since been purged, and yet the lessons of the past seem not to have been learned. For over ninety years now, World War One should have been used as an example of the human cost of conflict, yet wars continue…

Stoopud F**ken Animals

The question of origins, where or from whom a person comes, and how people create themselves in connection with this has haunted realist drama since the age of Ibsen. This new piece by Joel Harwood travels down this road pretty comfortably, exploring…

A Conversation with Edith Head

Hollywood costume designer Edith Head worked on almost 500 films in her 54-year career. She dressed Mae West, Dorothy Lamour and Barbara Stanwyck in their most iconic outfits. She played with the big boys at Paramount (and later Universal) and her onyx…

Killer Joe

Comedians doing serious theatre is a Fringe staple these days; this year, they’ve moved from cinema adaptations to filmic plays. Still, Tracy Letts’ script, in which an impoverished, lazily-drawn trailer park family strike a Faustian pact with local…

Lady of Burma

Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist and lady of Burma to which the title refers, is the only Nobel Peace Prize winner to be currently in jail. The country’s ruling military junta is one of the most abhorrent regimes in the world, with its…

The Container

Set in a life size cargo crate, The Container allows the audience to sit in on the fraught interaction between five refugees attempting to make their way illegally to Britain. Certain critics have lampooned some of the site specific shows on offer at…

Hippo World Guest Book

The internet has indeed made the world a smaller place but arguably that little bit more bilious too. As anyone who has spent even a moment on a forum or blog will be aware, faceless interaction can often serve as a Petri dish for the most vile human…

Believe – Linda Marlowe

This series of monologues from Matthew Hurt, performed by Linda Marlowe, evokes tales from the Old Testament in order to explore the nature of faith, and how we find ways of creating it within ourselves.

A Glance at New York

Another year, another excellent off-Broadway New York company debuts on the Fringe. Unlike their predecessors The Riot Group and T.E.A.M, however, Axis Theatre Company aren’t blazing trails with their original scripts. They’ve managed to create one of…

Night Time

At night the world becomes a different place as perfectly innocent objects appear sinister, shadows create threatening corners and noises are amplified. It’s easy for your imagination to get the better of you, an experience Chris (Kananu Kirimi) is all…

Yellow Moon

David Greig’s Yellow Moon is a modern teenage romance for the Burberry generation. Directed by Guy Hollands, the talented cast of four slip convincingly in and out of character as they efficiently narrate the chapters in this episode of a young man’s…

Tony! The Blair Musical

So much has been said about the former Prime Minister’s ‘legacy’ that it will come as no surprise to find that Chris Bush’s musical version adds little to a personality one occasionally wishes were more enigmatic. For all that though, there’s a zesty…

Auto Auto

Humans like doing what they know they shouldn’t: smoking, though we know it could kill us; drinking, though it makes us ill; eating the food that’s bad for us (ever got a thrill from eating a lettuce leaf?). But in real life, without running the risk of…

Woody Sez

Although the pop star world-saving concert is something we have become accustomed to in recent years, the politically aware musician is not a new invention. Long before Sir Bono or Sir Geldof, storytelling songwriter Woody Guthrie had hits describing…

La Femme Est Morte or Why Should I Not Fuck My Son

Britney is in a state of crisis. She split from her husband, shaved her head, drove with her son on her lap and allegedly tried to have his teeth whitened, and of course it’s all the media’s fault, just as they are held responsible for Phaedra’s demise…