Theatre
David Kettle
Dark Noon, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★★If there’s a more ambitious theatre production than Dark Noon at the Fringe this year, I’ve yet to see it. That’s ambitious in terms of its staging: during the course of the show’s 100 minutes (yes, it’s a proper, full-length production), virtually an entire town is constructed on a bare red-earth stage right before our eyes. But it’s also ambitious in terms of its themes and subject matter. This is the history of the Wild West, the great American push to the Pacific, frontier pioneers, gold rushes and the law of the gun. It’s a world of corruption Read more ...
David Kettle
The Insider, ZOO Southside ★★★★Uncovered and investigated in 2017, the Cum-Ex scam was a complex tax fraud that stole billions from the coffers of several European countries. Its principal was simple (well, fairly simple): companies would claim tax refunds on dividend payments for shares apparently owned across several territories, and therefore theoretically taxed more than once. The reality, however, was that the shares had simply been loaned, then returned: smart lawyers and accountants had discovered a loophole for claiming back money that had never been paid in the first place. Read more ...
David Kettle
A toy car – in fact, a mobile home with comically enormous antenna on top – shudders over arms and shoulders as if they were mountain ranges. A colossal polar bear comforts its curious cub. A lifesize puppet grandmother is chased up and down stairs by her over-enthusiastic stairlift.There’s a lot of humour, and of exquisite beauty, in this brief, ephemeral collaboration between two Belgian puppetry and mime companies, Focus and Challiwaté, at the International Festival. The overarching narrative – such as it is – involves a trio of characters (maybe reporters, possibly archivers, at least Read more ...
David Kettle
Maureen, House of Oz ★★★★Make yourself comfortable – we’ll be here for a while. That’s what our host, 80-something Maureen, advises us several times during the course of her unhurried, hypnotically vivid reminscences of a life lived to the full. The era-defining, population-shifting changes she’s witnessed across her home neighbourhood of King’s Cross, Sydney. The teenage lover who disappeared into the turmoil of World War Two and returned changed forever. The soulmate whose death celebrations she staged with exquisite care. The little black book in which she records the dates of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes. Two sisters (young, educated, attractive) bicker with each other. But for the pre-World War One era, they are not young, educated or attractive enough to acquire a gentleman for a husband, their only route out of a long, slow future of the same day repeating for decades. Things might change if the flirtations of man-on-the-make, Mr Smythe, can be converted into something more substantive.Staged in London for the first Read more ...
David Kettle
PLEASE LEAVE (a message), Underbelly, Cowgate ★★★★One of (brilliantly named) London-based theatre collective Clusterflux’s actors sent me a Twitter DM to request a review of their new show: here that review is, a few days later. Yucca Mountain in New Mexico also required a message, this time aimed at generations far into the future, to warn about the radioactive waste buried beneath it. Even Eighties pop icons Berlin and MC Hammer sent out messages into the future, tracks that we can now listen to as cultural artefacts from particular times and places.There’s a lot going on in Read more ...
David Kettle
With its throbbing crowds and its performers baying for attention (and for audiences), the Edinburgh Fringe can be a hectic, raucous place. But for anyone who needs a break from the crammed-full, in-your-face stand-up gigs, thankfully three shows provide far calmer, more intimate experiences – involving just you and one other.At Summerhall, Without Sin (★★★★, until 27 August), created by Dublin-based Unqualified Design Studio, takes the explicit form of a confessional – quite literally, with a specially constructed, two-alcove wooden box nestling on one side of the venue’s courtyard. Enter it Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Forty years ago, the world was very different for gay men. AIDS was devastating their communities, especially in the big cities where hard-won enclaves of acceptance were being hollowed out, one sunken-eyed friend after another. Media screamed “Gay Plague” and some politicians barely suppressed their glee at the “perverts’” comeuppance. Allies were thin on the ground, the redtop press with their finger on the outing trigger never happier than when destroying lives for circulation.Into such a hostile, fearful, vicious world, Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman launched La Cage Aux Folles on Read more ...
David Kettle
The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, Traverse Theatre ★★★The Traverse Theatre’s biggest, most lavish production for the 2023 festival is bold, colourful and joyful. It’s also, however, a somewhat patchy creation. Aaron (a gangly, gormless Ali Watt) has just started working at the institution of the show’s title, but he quickly hears rumours of its former life as an opera house, and is almost immediately smitten by a mysterious opera-singing figure (Karen Fishwick, in fine voice) he encounters. Is she a ghost, or someone more earthly?Phantoms aren’t the only element in The Grand Old Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tennessee, Rose, Pleasance Dome ★★★Clare Cockburn's new play posits the notion that all the women in Tennessee Williams' work were inspired in some way by his older sister, Rose, who spent most of her life in mental institutions after being lobotomised.Cockburn explores how Tennessee Williams' raw examination of the human spirit and the repeated themes of forbidden love, betrayal and mental fragility in his work came from his own life.Cockburn works in two timeframes: one where Rose (Anne Kidd) is old, feeble in mind and body, and another, back when she and Tennessee (Aron Dochard) are Read more ...
David Kettle
Adults, Traverse Theatre ★★★Outside the festival madness of August, Edinburgh is a bit of a village. So it’s no surprise if you keep bumping into people you know. For entrepreneurial Zara, however, it nonetheless comes as a shock that the latest client at her fair-pay sex-work collective is her former teacher Iain, there to try things out with a guy for the first time. The awkwardness levels crank up even further, though, with the arrival of Jay, Iain’s partner for his allotted 45 minutes, as well as Jay’s crying baby, and a mobile phone that can record the whole affair.There are Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Flat & the Curves, Pleasance Dome ★★★★Flat & the Curves – Katy Baker, Charlotte Brooke, Issy Wroe Wright and Arabella Rodrigo – perform a gig-style musical comedy show with risqué material about what it means to be a modern woman. And there's a generous side helping about the inadequacy of men, too.The songs in Divadom feature an impressive range of musical styles and pastiche – from 90s girl groups, jazz cabaret and even light opera – as the foursome sing their anthems to womanhood, either to backing tracks or with keyboard accompaniment by Brooke. The lyrics are wonderfully Read more ...