Reviews & features: Steve Cramer

The Testament of Cresseid

Classic Scots poem, recited with a modest touch of theatre

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…

Tap and Chat with Lionel Blair

Does exactly what it says on the tin

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…

The Works of Fate

Makes up for its rough edges with major gusto

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…

Edinburgh festival delivers a good innings

Steve Cramer's Festival Blog

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…

The Sound of My Voice

A dark and powerful piece of entertainment

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…

To tire of Londoners at the Edinburgh Fringe

Steve Cramer's Festival blog

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…

The Dandelion’s Story

The circle of life

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…

The Overcoat

Warm and beautiful visual theatre

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…

Been So Long

Great tunes, pounding voices and beguiling dialogue

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…

Super Situation

An engaging physical performance

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…

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Steve Cramer's Festival blog

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…

Diaspora

Beautiful music, grand multimedia, but where’s the beef?

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…

Faith Healer

Faith, fate and chance

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…

Accidental Nostalgia

The past is a foreign country music

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…

A-Team – The Musical

DIY nostalgia for fans of the original

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…

Fringe demands sacrifice of sartorial splendour

Steve Cramer's Festival Blog

Let us go then, you and I, to the place where one wishes the streets were half deserted, and the only muttering retreat you get is two hours sleep. But the Fringe is afoot, and it really hasn’t been a bad start. Leaving aside a School for Scandal the…

Boxing clever a wise move for sons of privilege

Steve Cramer's Festival Blog

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…

Barflies

Smart, accomplished tale of schism’n’booze

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 Palace of the End

Caught between Iraq and a hard place

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…

School for Scandal

School for vandals

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…

The Last Witch - Rona Munro

Outside of panto season, it’s difficult to find a dramatist these days who’s keen to write about witches. While the idea of witchcraft might bring a certain primal frisson to some, and a sociological fascination to others, the contemporary theatre has…

Sylvia Plath - Three Women, The First Revival

Rare production of the poet’s play, with fine performances

There’s more than a touch of the poet and playwright herself in each of the three titular characters in Robert Shaw’s production of what was originally a radio play from 1962. The triumvirate of voices are those of a wife (Louisa Clein), a secretary…

White Tea

Emotionally dense, textually nuanced journey through time and space

Writer-director David Leddy’s latest piece requires its audience to robe up in white kimonos before embarking on an imaginative journey from Paris to Japan, without ever leaving the small room in the Assembly Rooms in which it takes place. Its use of…

Little Gem

Tale of three generations of Irish women produces theatrical Groundhog Day

Here’s a tale of three much put-upon Dublin working folk, each with parallel monologues about a series of bawdy, tragic and sometimes comic events they all share in. Again. The problem with Eileen Murphy’s account of three generations of women in a…