Theatre
David Kettle
Òran, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Glasgow-based theatre company Wonder Fools are having a particularly busy Fringe. Alongside a revival of their excellent football drama Same Team at the Traverse Theatre, their far smaller, more intimate show Òran has company co-artistic director Robbie Gordon deliver a blistering solo performance inside a shipping container at the back of the Pleasance Courtyard. It’s far better than that probably sounds.And while Òran might open with smiles and camaraderie – with audience members greeted and assigned micro-roles, for example – things quickly get far Read more ...
Gary Naylor
On opening night, there’s always a little tension in the air. Tech rehearsals and previews can only go so far – this is the moment when an audience, some wielding pens like scalpels, sit in judgement. Having attended thousands on the critics’ side of the fourth wall, I can tell you that there’s plenty of crackling expectation and a touch of fear in the stalls, too. None more so than when the show is billed as a new musical.By the interval (much before that if it’s a hit), you’re locating the production on a multi-dimensional spectrum, assessing its component parts (acting, plot, design), its Read more ...
David Kettle
Ni Mi Madre, Pleasance Dome ★★★★ Philip Larkin offered a famously pithy assessment of parents’ impact on their offspring’s future lives. It’s one that Brazilian/Ecuadorian/Italian/Dominican writer and performer Arturo Luíz Soria would no doubt sympathise with – at least partly – in the solo show he’s built around memories of his mother. In fact, Ni Mi Madre is very much the older woman’s show: Soria transforms himself into Bete, the larger-than-life diva, harridan and force of nature who raised him, taking us through her three husbands and countless kids, her extravagant neediness and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
More surely than any other London stage, the Globe has opened up our theatrical perspective on different languages. Its triumphant “Globe to Globe” 2012 season presented the Shakespeare canon in 37 different linguistic interpretations.Among those varied treats from, literally, across the globe, the British Sign Language (BSL) production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, from London’s Deafinitely Theatre, was the only one that did not cross national borders; instead, it crossed the boundaries of theatre itself.It’s a direction that the Globe has continued to explore over the years, with the opening Read more ...
David Kettle
Bellringers, Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★★ Dystopian climate-crisis dramas seemed ten-a-penny at the Fringe a few years back, but they’re far thinner on the ground in 2024. Which makes this deliciously elusive, oblique debut drama from Daisy Hall all the more intriguing, and valued.Clement and Aspinall appear in monk-like cassocks in a church belfry, apparently summoned by a fast-approaching storm. It’s their job to ring the tower’s bells, perhaps to alert residents of their Oxfordshire village to the impending deluge, or even act as some kind of community-protecting talisman simply by Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Before a word is spoken, a pause held, we hear the seagulls squawking outside, see the (let’s say brown) walls that remind you of the H-Block protests of the 1980s, witness the pitifully small portions for breakfast. If you were in any doubt that we were anywhere other than submerged beneath the fag end of the post-war years of austerity, the clothes confirm it. And a thought surfaces and will jab throughout the two hours runtime: “How different are things today in, say, Clacton?”But Ultz’s design work has grounded Harold Pinter’s second play firmly in pre-Beatles England, where even Elvis Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At one point, in John Fowles’s 1977 novel The Magus, the guru character in the story compares sexuality before and after the 1960s. He says that although “young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not”, there is also a loss – “a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion”.Sexual restraint has its own tender feelings. It is this emotional landscape that lies at the heart of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s debut play, Peanut Butter & Blueberries, at the Kiln Theatre. It’s a contemporary Muslim love story in which the two lovers never even touch each other.Set in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later have a tempestuous falling out. That’s the main narrative arc of these twin plays, but it accounts for none of their extraordinary richness and the superlative acting they entail. These are monologues, a genre where dramatic excellence is primed to go right off the scale: think the powerful solos of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, the haunted storytellers of Conor McPherson’s plays, Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall. Recast after their runs at the Dorfman, the trio of plays is directed by Clint Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Adam Riches: Jimmy, Summerhall ★★★Adam Riches has long been famed as a performer who throws himself into his physical comedy – so much so that during the Fringe run of a previous comedy show he broke his leg. And now, with this one-man play he is on stage in tennis whites, running around and slamming down imaginary balls to a percussive soundtrack as he tells the story of Jimmy Connors, the self-proclaimed world's greatest tennis player.It's a fascinating story that even some keen tennis fans might not know. Connors retired at the age of 43, playing on well past his best days. But during Read more ...
David Kettle
The Sound Inside, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★ Adam Rapp’s unapologetically intricate, bookish two-hander arrives for its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre following a successful run in New York, including no fewer than six Tony nominations. It’s not a new work, then, but its themes and its gloriously, unashamedly erudite writing make it one of the strongest offerings in the Traverse’s Fringe programme.Not for nothing do literary references ricochet back and forth across Rapp’s Ivy League thriller-cum-love story. Bella Baird is a Yale professor of creative writing, and she discovers a Read more ...
David Kettle
In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work takes place. The relocation is smooth and straightforward, however – well, kind of, until Mother returns to her obsessive praying, and even cancels the building work itself when she gets furious at how long it’s taking.Joanne Ryan’s increasingly tense but ultimately moving two-hander from Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company might have a dramatically Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck’s award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. A grim study of human goodness in an unrelentingly cruel universe, it’s a long slog for both cast and audience.Steinbeck based his novel on his experiences in 1936 of reporting for a San Francisco newspaper on the US migrant camps known as Hoovervilles, after the President who set them up. But relief for their residents — escapees from the US’s economic collapse in the early 1930s and the Dust Bowl that then destroyed over-farmed land in Texas and Oklahoma — would have to wait Read more ...