Sorted by date / most viewed / title / star rating. Showing 25, 50, 100 per page.
17 Sep 2009
Perhaps the weightiest problem that confronted Mabou Mines in bringing this long-established production (first conceived in the mid-80s and running for 14 years) to Edinburgh was the issue of how many tons of coal Newcastle could take. Putting up a…
3 Sep 2009
Over the years, there have been a number of examples of dramatists borrowing characters from other writers’ works and giving them life elsewhere, but no version of this kind of experiment could be as striking as Brian Friel’s reflection on the later…
1 Sep 2009
If broad strokes of theatricality are to your taste this new translation of Robert Henryson’s 15th Century Scots riposte to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, directed by David Levine, might not be entirely to your taste. There’s a strong sense of the…
The giddiness of love, as well as the dark cynicism that can sometimes undermine it, is a thematic concern to which Brian Friel’s work frequently returns. In this loose theatrical adaptation of Chekov’s short story ‘Lady with Lapdog’, we see an…
26 Aug 2009
This show does exactly what it says on the tin. Lionel does a little tap dancing, which given his antiquity is impressive, then goes into a series of showbiz recollections of days gone by about everyone from Brucie to Liza, adding songs and bits of film…
25 Aug 2009
This bawdy and at times comical take on De Sade follows the awaited return of a prodigal son, turning, by an outrageous contrivance, into a meta-theatrical re-enactment of the sordid life of his stepmother, with much emphasis on its violence and sexual…
24 Aug 2009
I seem to have touched a nerve with my last blog. Today, I received an (admittedly second hand) report that it had been said of me that I was clearly a narrow minded little Scotlander for speaking ill of London. The actor friend on the receiving end of…
Beneath its bare story there’s something far more complex at work in Rona Munro’s new piece for the Traverse and the EIF. This re-imagining of the true, though factually sketchy, demise of Janet Horne, a Dornoch woman executed for witchcraft in 1727 and…
This revival of an acclaimed two-hander from the Citizens Theatre has lost little of its power. Adapted from Ron Butlin’s novel by director Jeremy Raison, it tells the story of a biscuit company executive’s descent into alcoholism. The punishing…
23 Aug 2009
After Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea, I went to the Assembly bar and drank the tea. I was contemplating which was the more indifferent drinking experience out of these two, when I was cheered by a chance meeting with Candida Benson, an actress whose own…
21 Aug 2009
Justin Butcher and Ahmed Masoud’s production is a bleak reminder of the human consequences of the Zionist aggression in Gaza, particularly focusing on the recent bloodbath enacted in the last days of the Bush government. Its story focuses on a young…
A dog drops an enormous poo. The lonely shite is then shunned by birds, chickens and farmers until a delicate friendship is formed between her and a clod of earth, and she turns into a dandelion. This Korean variation on The Ugly Duckling with physical…
20 Aug 2009
For anyone feeling trapped within a workplace, shackled by social convention and oppressed by materialism this collaborative adaptation by Gecko of Gogol’s short story will perfectly express your discontent. Amit Lahav’s production is a technical…
19 Aug 2009
Imagine a super heroine with a banal suburban life who, between foiling an evil genius repeatedly attempting to destroy the earth, likes nothing more than to curl up in front of the telly with a pizza, and you’ve seen the whole joke of this one-woman…
The Scottish premiere of Che Walker and Arthur Darvill’s straight play-turned musical brings a bittersweet reflection upon love and our fear of it, tempered by a sardonic streetwise wit, which, pleasingly, isn’t nearly as tough as it makes out. The…
18 Aug 2009
There’s a paradox to being a reviewer. On the one hand, one is constantly badgered by theatre companies to see their shows, and on the other, when you arrive at their venues, they won’t let you in. Colonel Blood had easier access to the crown jewels…
17 Aug 2009
The Gate Theatre’s opening piece in its Brian Friel mini-festival for the EIF is perhaps that author’s most complex and admired play. Its significances are so myriad that dozens of critical appraisals have attempted to fathom out its meaning. But the…
The uncertainty about identity imposes itself upon people whose origins lie somewhere other than where they live creates the central focus for Ong Ken Sen’s Diaspora . Its exploration of tensions between new worlds and old through a series of stories…
14 Aug 2009
There’s a cute, homespun feel to the cardboard props, hand-held backdrops and plywood vehicles of Joss Bennathan’s production, from a playful bit of tongue-in-cheek 1980s nostalgia by Gareth Kane. That said, it might need more material to fully take…
Underneath this bizarre, eccentric and hypnotic little operetta lies so many of the themes of the old 90s style postmodernism that it really ought not to work. Memory, subjectivity, selfhood and identity; the whole shebang smacks of the Generation X…
13 Aug 2009
The lizard ails! As the Fringe moves on apace, and one enters into the strange, Through the Looking Glass world of sweaty venues, crowded pubs, dreadful hacks and appalling luvvies, one’s domestic arrangements seem a distant and desperately pined for…
A third of Judith Thompson’s trilogy of monologues – an imagined conversation with Lynndie England, perhaps the most noticed of the convicted Abu Ghraib prison guards – was seen at the Traverse some years back. Its two new additions add a cumulative…
Ben Harrison’s production, adapted from a series of Charles Bukowski short stories, is very much what you might expect in terms of subject matter, but its treatment at the hands of Grid Iron, brings a certain whimsical élan to the squalor. That the…
The cartoonist, Harry Horse presented a haunting, gothic vision of contemporary Britain in the Sunday Herald in the year before his tragic and early death in January 2007. These bare facts and a few more are communicated by Tam Dean Burn before he…
RB Sheridan’s classic comedy has much to recommend it in our current era of vacuous celebrity tittle-tattle and grotesque self-interest. Yet the normally admirable Cal McCrystal’s production seems to have read the text so radically against what it seems…
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