Reviews & features: Theatre
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Treasure Island
10 Aug 2012
Comedy on the seven seas
There’s nothing groundbreaking about this new show from Derby’s Uncontained Arts. But sometimes it’s OK to just tell it like it is, and Treasure Island has enough unusual characters and exciting plot developments for them to get away with it. Building…
Tiddler and Other Terrific Tales
10 Aug 2012
Julia Donaldson over-kill
Scamp Theatre’s 2011 adaptation of Stick Man was a skilful blend of lively storytelling, great songs and playful actors. They did Julia Donaldson proud. So it comes as something of a disappointment to see what they’ve done with Tiddler. As you would…
Night of the Big Wind
9 Aug 2012
Touching show set in an Irish fishing village, ambitiously told
Following last year’s hugely enjoyable Street Dreams, Canterbury-based Little Cauliflower Theatre Company return with more puppetry, physical theatre and clowning in this whimsical and sometimes dewy-eyed show set in an Irish fishing village. But here…
Teach Me
9 Aug 2012
Touching comedy from Edinburgh-based young company
Simon is a naïve 18-year-old, keen as mustard to get his first taste of naughtiness but clueless about how it all works. Emma is ten years older, in a ‘complicated’ relationship with a married man, and now unexpectedly alone with Simon in a bedroom at a…
Belt Up Theatre’s A Little Princess
9 Aug 2012
Unengaging adaptation of a timeworn classic
Young York company Belt Up Theatre have been the toast of the Fringe in recent years for their immersive, intensive renditions of stories new and old, but it feels like things have gone off the boil slightly with this staging of Frances Hodgson…
Midnight at the Boar’s Head
9 Aug 2012
Shakespeare's characters meet and clash in a folksy pub setting
Here’s one: a porter, a king and a shrew walk into a bar. What happens next? Midnight at the Boar’s Head bumps Shakespeare’s characters’ heads together as they meet in a pub to get drunk, pick fights and flirt with strangers, all in Shakespeare’s…
Lingua Frank
9 Aug 2012
Grindingly obvious comedy with lame jokes fails talented cast
Lingua Frank is supposedly a comic play but is really a sketch show, stretched to snapping point. The scant plot revolves around bumbling English Language tutor Frank (Harry Gooch), who has lost his girlfriend and is on the brink of losing his job. A…
Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice
9 Aug 2012
Sci-fi triptych scuttled by a slow pace and repetition
This retro sci-fi two-hander walks the fine line between conceptually impressive and impressively boring. While this trio of sketches is certainly interesting, ultimately the slow pace, repetitiveness, and rejection of narrative make watching it an…
People Like Us
9 Aug 2012
An A-grade for effort, but sadly Savage Theatre fails to hit the spot
Young company Savage Theatre have brought a beast of a play to the Fringe this year. With its harrowing subject matter, tempestuous characters and broken dreams, People Like Us should be a gripping and engaging drama. Young lovers Simon and Stacey…
Hearts on Fire
9 Aug 2012
Immersive recreation of 2009 sweat lodge deaths
The Fringe guide makes this sound like a participatory event, but it's not any more so than any other performance. It is immersive, though, with a setting inside a heated sweat lodge at the top of C's most recently commandeered venue. Recreating the…
The Prize
8 Aug 2012
Steve Gilroy and Richard Stockwell's latest not quite living the Olympic dream
Gold and silver are mere split seconds apart. Hair’s breadths. There’s just as little between Olympians and Paralympians: a ladder that slips; a bout of meningitis; an IED underfoot. Life may not be fair, but – as the London 2012 hopefuls and former…
NOLA
8 Aug 2012
Underwhelming take on the 2010 BP oil spill
Theatre company Look Left Look Right scored two hits last year with innovative interactive pieces – You Once Said Yes and You Wouldn’t Know Him, He Lives In Texas – and their offering this year is a verbatim documentary piece about the 2010 BP oil…
Nggrfg
8 Aug 2012
Stereotypically confessional coming-of-age tale
Aged 16, Buddy aspires to grow up to become Canada’s Prime Minister. His teacher pooh-poohs the idea: ‘Because your bl...’ He checks himself. ‘I’ve never known a politician as – um – flamboyant as you.’ Buddy’s too camp to be black and too black to…
Oliver Reed: Wild Thing
8 Aug 2012
Rob Crouch paints a blazing theatrical portrait of the renowned boozer
In this excellent one-man show, the renowned hellraiser recounts his wayward life from beyond the grave and, appropriately, during the course of a mammoth boozing session. Rob Crouch does a superb job of playing the British film star of the 1960 and…
You Obviously Know What I’m Talking About
8 Aug 2012
Intelligent comic theatre about obsessive-compulsive nerd is surprisingly good
This cleverly devised bit of comic theatre boasts a marvellous set. Good job, too, given it concerns an extreme obsessive-compulsive, a reclusive nerd named Winfield Scott-Boring, whose entire carefully ordered daily life takes place within the confines…
Irreconcilable Differences
8 Aug 2012
Car crash drama is punchy and heartfelt if ultimately rather hackneyed
A couple. A car crash. Who lives? You decide. In reality, Benjamin and Pollyanna are clinging to life from their adjacent operating tables. We see them in an abstract limbo, tied together at the wrists, scrapping for our sympathies in order to…
After the Rainfall
8 Aug 2012
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…
Maurice's Jubilee
8 Aug 2012
Softly charming piece that doesn’t quite set the heart alight
Maurice's health might be fading but his love for the Queen, sparked by a shared dance on Coronation night, remains undimmed. Will Maurice manage to hold on for one last encounter with Her Madge? Nichola McAuliffe's latest comedy, Maurice's Jubilee…
Bound
8 Aug 2012
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
8 Aug 2012
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…
The Price of Everything
8 Aug 2012
Entertaining vision of a society built on kindness, by Daniel Bye
Daniel Bye is a man on a mission. From start to finish his performance lecture is out to prove that there are some things you just can’t put a price on. Starting with the lecture, Bye takes to the stage with a slideshow to ponder the price of…
Top 5 tech-related shows at the Edinburgh Festivals 2012
8 Aug 2012
Featuring Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Misha Glenny, Mark Restuccia and Through the Looking Screen
The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs A one-man theatre show detailing the working conditions in Chinese factories that manufacture the iPhone, highlighting the lengths we are willing to go to in pursuit of technological advancement. Steve…
All That is Wrong
7 Aug 2012
Restrained, compelling piece from provocative Belgian company
There’s power in simplicity this year, for the Belgian theatre company, Ontroerend Goed. Often tagged as ‘provocative’ or ‘controversial’ because of their knowing messing around with conventions – see their previous, excellent Fringe offerings, The…
The Letter of Last Resort / Good With People
7 Aug 2012
Double bill of short dramas that push the nuclear button
As the independence referendum draws nearer, with Trident shaping up as a particularly thorny feature of the debate around Scotland’s future, a revival of these two short works by two of Scotland’s leading playwrights offers keen, if contrasting, takes…
The Blind
7 Aug 2012
Stunningly powerful outdoors multimedia spectacle
Krakow-based KTO Theatre pulls off a rare feat in combining stunning visual effects with a potent emotional impact in its gripping, wordless show The Blind. Whether through pounding music, imagery that’s by turns shocking and poignantly beautiful, or…
