Reviews & features: Theatre, Allan Radcliffe

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…

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…

Beats

Tremendous recreation of rave culture

Tremendous recreation of rave culture In 1994 the UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act outlawed gatherings of more than 100 people with a soundtrack of ‘amplified music characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. In the…

I, Malvolio

Revisiting Shakespeare’s maligned steward

Appearing in the latter half of a Festival that has made its theatre audience work harder than in previous years, Tim Crouch keeps us on the edge of our seats with a show that probes cultural tastes through the figure of Shakespeare’s much maligned…

Debbie Does Dallas - The Musical

There’s a very fine line between a send-up of a ropey cultural item and something that’s just plain ropey. Almost from its shrill opening bars it becomes crystal clear that Debbie Does Dallas – The Musical has crossed the line. The fundamental…

The Idiot at the Wall

Promising debut from English/Gaelic company

Elspeth Turner’s play was inspired by Gaelic folktales and songs and there’s certainly something comfortingly old-fashioned and fable-like about the storytelling here. The familiar enough premise – the culture clash between metropolitan sophistication…

The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

Powerful but rather static monologue

There’s no denying the power of American monologuist Mike Daisey’s one-man show. A one-time worshipper at the altar of Apple, the writer’s desire to learn more about the human beings assembling his favourite gizmos inspired a trip to the Chinese…

Grit

Powerful and quietly moving depiction of children in conflict

The new show from Scotland’s Tortoise in a Nutshell is barely three-quarters of an hour in length. Yet the journey it takes its audience on, both geographical and emotional, is extensive. The piece draws on real-life accounts by war correspondents to…

The Rape of Lucrece

Bold interpretation of Shakespeare's poem from Edinburgh favourite Camille O'Sullivan

It’s not every performer at the Edinburgh International Festival that enters to applause and finishes to a standing ovation but, then, Camille O’Sullivan is not just any performer. Having built an impressive following over the years as a mesmerising…

Tam O’Shanter

Earthy, energetic riff on Burns’ masterpiece

‘When chapman billies leave the street / And drouthy neibours, neibours meet’. It’s the best-kent pair of opening lines in Scots poetry, but if you were hoping for a straight rendition of Burns’ masterpiece, Communicado theatre company are more than…

Love Letters to the Public Transport System

Life-affirming monologue celebrates society’s unsung heroes

The premise of Molly Taylor’s monologue sounds, in summary, so precious you wouldn’t expect it to work as a piece of drama. In 2009, following a painful break-up and the loss of her permanent job, Taylor travelled by bus to London where a chance meeting…

Angels

Powerful monologue with a stunning central performance

Save for a single hanging strip-light, the studio space at the Traverse is so utterly bare that you begin to suspect the audience has been the victim of a cruel practical joke. But then actor Iain Robertson appears and strikes up the opening passages of…

Educating Ronnie

Compelling true-life fable engagingly told

Joe Douglas’ day job may be that of professional theatre director, but his one-man show is based on a strand of his own life that’s far richer than anything he could have made up. The story dates back ten years to his gap year in Uganda. Alongside…

Morning

Play for teenagers exerts a certain painful fascination

At first glimpse Simon Stephens’ ‘play for young people’ seems to take place in the same universe as an episode of Hollyoaks. Stephanie (Scarlet Billham) and her friends at sixth-form college hang out and have breathless discussions about sex, clothes…

The Letter of Last Resort / Good With People

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…

Monstrous Acts

Bluebeard inspires 15th century prison romance

The first ten minutes of this production from Australia’s Out Cast Theatre are wordless. When the dialogue finally kicks in, it rather punctures the wonderfully charged atmosphere of the opening scenes, which establish the power dynamic between a pair…

Playwright Johnny O'Callaghan discusses Who's Your Daddy?

The play is based on O'Callaghan's own experiences as a single man adopting a Ugandan child

Was it difficult to make a piece of theatre out of your own life? There was almost a need to write the story. I had to get it out of me. It was funny discovering the adoption took nine months – how I felt pregnant, craving processed meat even though I…

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2012: Theatre highlights

Steve Jobs, Casablanca, Belt Up, MacBeth in Scots and more

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Mike Daisey’s powerful monologue, which shed uncomfortable light on the appalling working conditions in Chinese factories creating Apple products, attracted acclaim and controversy in the US. You’ll never look at…

Untitled Love Story

Stories of love and loss that fail to catch fire

Untitled Love Story is the first of David Leddy’s productions for years to be set in a conventional theatre. And, while the Venice-set meditation on lost love contains the lyrical writing and formal innovations that have made his past work so exciting…

The Tempest

Anarchic comedy showcases Korean theatrical traditions and retains spirit of the original

Shakespeare’s swansong enjoys a unique status in the playwright’s canon. Part magical realist fantasy, part forerunner to the absurdist tragicomedy, part wry comment on the nature of playwriting itself, The Tempest floats outside of the classifications…

Ten Plagues

Intense, moving Marc Almond-starring plague musical strikes a chord

A one-man musical based on eyewitness accounts of the London Plague of 1665 starring Marc Almond sounds on paper like the kind of parody you’d find on the website fakefringe.com. Indeed, the 80s pop icon seems nervous as he takes to the stage in black…

Free Run

Heavily padded parkour spectacle

The warning that diffuses through the auditorium is ominous. ‘What you are about to see is not restricted to the stage’. Sure enough, this is one of those Fringe shows where you’re definitely not safer in the back row. Within moments of the house lights…

After the End

Gripping if uneven thriller adaptation

The action of Dennis Kelly’s thriller takes place in a nuclear shelter in the aftermath of an explosion, but the play’s politics, we discover, are of the personal rather than global kind. The two-hander opens immediately following the atrocity. Louise…

Pop-Up! The Amazing Adventures of Moo-Dong

The art of entertaining

Theatre Bom’s Pop-Up! is based around the inspired notion of recreating famous paintings, such as Arcimboldo’s ‘fruit faces’ and Seurat’s ‘Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette’, live onstage. Don’t be nervous: an in-depth knowledge of…

2011 Fringe for a Fiver - Theatre

Not got a brass razoo to your name? Don’t let that spoil your Fringe fun as we present 50 shows you can see for a mere five of your Scottish pound coins Alice in Wonderland and Other Adventures with Lewis Carroll Richard Smithies brings to life the…