Theatre
The SpongeBob Musical, QEH review - musical based on popular kids' animation sinks for lack of focus
Gary Naylor
There are many things that you are not told about being a parent, a vast landscape of details that batter you with unwelcome difference from that comfortable life of Friday night prosecco and pizza. One is a whole new palette of garish colours barging into your eyeline – fluorescent yellow, eye-bleeding orange, vomity green. As quickly as you learn about this hitherto unknown spectrum that even van Gogh might think a little too much, you forget, the brain too addled by fatigue to retain any information from those shocking sleepless years. Until you go to see The SpongeBob Musical – then they’ Read more ...
David Kettle
Casting the Runes, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ A viciously critical review gets its unfortunate writer driven mad and sent to an untimely death in this adaptation of a macabre MR James chiller. In that case, I’d better be careful what I say about British movement and puppetry company Box Tale Soup’s fluent two-hand staging. Though to call their Casting the Runes a two-hander isn’t strictly correct: actors Noel Byrne and Antonia Christophers (who also adapted the tale for the stage, adding in a few choice elements from elsewhere in James’s output) are joined by three puppets in Read more ...
David Kettle
Trojan Women, Festival Theatre ★★★★★You can feel the white-hot intensity radiating from the stage virtually from start to finish of this remarkable, hypnotic production from the National Changgeuk Company of Korea and Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise: the show has been around since 2016 and has already toured internationally to enormous acclaim, before stopping off for its three International Festival performances.But that’s not to detract from the sheer overwhelming power of Trojan Women. Ong has collided together the austere, ritualistic Korean Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those who really should have seen through his shallowness and vaulting ambition – he even says the phrase himself – and achieves power without really knowing what to do with it. The crown not only justifies the means of his ascension up the slippery pole, but its preservation becomes the sole object of his every deed. History does not record if Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Groomed Pleasance Dome ★★★★“How can a truth be told? How can a secret be spoken?” Patrick Sandford asks in Groomed, his searingly honest account of his experience of abuse by a teacher at primary school several decade ago. Over 50 minutes he recounts his tale, weaving in other stories to illuminate his own.At first it’s not clear why there is a saxophonist on stage (playing music by Simon Slater) providing an intermittent soundtrack. But as we hear about the accident-prone Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax and a Japanese soldier who didn’t surrender until long after the Second World War was Read more ...
David Kettle
FOOD, The Studio ★★★There’s no denying it: Los Angeles-born Geoff Sobelle is a theatrical magician (quite literally – it’s how he began his career). Through a string of visually spectacular shows on the Fringe and more recently at the International Festival, he’s unleashed wildlife into the streets of Edinburgh, drawn aeons of history from a cardboard box, and even constructed an entire house on stage.So it’s perhaps no surprise that, for his new FOOD unveiled this year, Sobelle has transformed the Festival Theatre’s smaller Studio space into the setting for an immense dinner party Read more ...
David Kettle
Heaven, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★It’s a rare show that combines form and content to quite such devastatingly potent effect. The storyline of two-hander Heaven from Dublin-based Fishamble theatre company might seem simple: a middle-aged couple return to their former home town, where they encounter old (and new) flames, leading to a reassessment of their partnership, love and hopes.Despite the narrow focus of the material – examined in forensic detail in Eugene O’Brien’s penetrating script – there’s nonetheless a mythic quality to these two everypeople, buffeted by forces greater than Read more ...
David Kettle
Stuntman, Summerhall ★★★★★Masculinity and violence are hot subjects for theatrical examination – and dance theatre two-hander Stuntman from Scottish company Superfan is far from the only Fringe show that investigates them this year. What makes Stuntman stand out, though, is a particularly playful, even tender perspective on those forbiddingly thorny issues, and a joyfully light-touch appraisal of their crucial impact on male identity and relationships.The show might begin with gleeful live-action re-enactments of shoot-em-up hyperviolence from the two swaggering performers, all Read more ...
David Kettle
The Death and Life of All of Us, Summerhall ★★★★Victor Esses was 16 when he first discovered his grandmother had a sister – someone the family had never discussed. It was just a year after his own first illicit visit to a gay sauna.Esses’s deceptively slight show – just him, a couple of microphones, some clips of video interviews and characterful musical contributions from guitarist Enrico Aurigemma – might begin as something of a whodunnit mystery tale, as Esses tracks down the mysterious elderly woman to a golf club outside Rome. But it quickly moves on to profounder – and, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
At first, it’s hard to believe that the true story of Colonel Blood’s audacious attempt to steal The Crown Jewels from the Tower of London in 1671 has not provided the basis for a play before. After two hours of Simon Nye’s pedestrian telling of the tale as a comedy, you have your answer.We open on a lover of the King who regales us in song – since it’s Carrie Hope Fletcher (this production is not short of star quality), we can forgive the tinny piped-in music and enjoy her tremendous singing voice. The character returns a couple of times but (and this is a recurring theme in a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A new theatre? In 2023? Now there’s a shot in the arm for the post-pandemic gloom. But there’s no business like show business – not for Mayfield Lavender anyway, who have found a corner of one of their beautiful purple fields and built an outdoor theatre for the poor, neglected souls of er… Epsom – but any investment in arts is surely welcome in these most philistine of times. Co-founded by Artistic Director Joe McNeice and Executive Director Brendan Maye, the space is still a little rough and ready at the moment and its vast stage may need a little reconfiguring unless budgets Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The shadow of Grenfell Tower has already produced Nick Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor’s dispassionately forensic but devastating documentary plays based on transcripts from the Grenfell Inquiry. Now comes a companion piece, the National’s Grenfell, a verbatim play using excerpts from the same source, but larded by Gillian Slovo into a wider account of the fire by those who were in it, to equally wrenching effect.The cast of 12 arrive in the National’s small Dorfman space and one by one introduce themselves: first by their own names, then as the main character they will play (all take on a Read more ...