Reviews
Veronica Lee
Jake Lambert, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Jake Lambert warms up the audience by describing how much he enjoyed lockdown (despite a relationship break-up), and he suspects that football players enjoyed playing for a season without spectators too – “Whose job wouldn't be improved by removing thousands of people calling you a wanker?”But the pandemic is not the thrust of Liminal, merely the way into its main theme. Lambert has epilepsy (a subject he has addressed before in his comedy), and tells a touching story – punctuated by big laughs – about how he came to be diagnosed, and the help Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It does need saying: the RPO may receive less frequent plaudits than some of their London peers, but this is a fine and wonderfully responsive orchestra with a distinctive character.The string sections have a natural opulence and warmth in their sound and always work with an impressive unanimity of purpose right through to the back desks. The wind are blessed with characterful and persuasive principal players, plus that strong feel of a unified section. The brass rarely, if ever put a foot wrong. And the first group that Vasily Petrenko asked to rise to their feet at the end of last night’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s nothing quite like magic, live, up close and personal. Sure there are the TV spectaculars, the casino resort mega-shows and even The Masked Magician to pull back the curtains, but there’s a frisson in the air when the card that’s in your head appears in the conjuror’s hand. Roll in a spot of cabaret and circus and the tang of transgression tingles on the tongue, the grim world of the natural sliding away, the supernatural its welcome substitute. Such is the aim behind the West End’s new, purpose-built, magic/cabaret venue, Wonderville, the brainchild of creative director Laura Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It is quite some years, if not decades, since the Edinburgh International Festival had any claim to be a festival of staged opera. This year we have had just one – Garsington Opera’s bewitching Rusalka – surrounded by a handful of concert performances: Beethoven’s Fidelio with the Philharmonia under Donald Runnicles, Handel’s Saul (yet to come), and Sunday evening’s Salome.There is, of course, much to be said for a really good concert performance; the bar was set almost unattainably high in the 1990s by Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s series of Mozart’s Da Ponte Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hal Cruttenden, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Hal Cruttenden is the kind of observational comic who talks about his home life a lot, so when his wife announced recently that their marriage was over it could have meant a quick swerve away from the personal stuff. But as it's an amicable break (they're still living in the same house) he can talk about it on stage.In It's Best You Hear It From Me Cruttenden details the pitfalls of long marriages, advancing middle age and now the awful prospect of being back on the dating scene. He poses the important questions of who gets the house, who Read more ...
David Nice
Two quirky concertos – one for orchestra, though it might also be called a sinfonietta – and a big symphony: best of British but, more important, international and world class. Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra sounded glorious throughout from my seat – at 7 of the Albert Hall clock if the conductor is at 12 – but the eccentric charms of Mark-Anthony Turnage and Vaughan Williams fared better than the elusive soul of Elgar.There’s no doubt about it, Turnage’s Time Flies is a brilliant opener for any concert (and accomplished youth orchestras ought to give it a go). Co-commissioned by Read more ...
David Kettle
"I feel I owe you an explanation." That much James Thierrée concedes partway through his sprawling, freewheeling, dream-like, hallucinatory Room in Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre. By which stage, most of the audience was probably in agreement. It’s a proposal he comes back to again and again during the rest of the show – but, of course, no explanation ever materialises, save a few strangulated noises, which seem about the best Thierrée can manage.With its weird, magical, disconnected images, its restless shifts in tone, its collision of dance, mime, acrobatics, music, circus, stagework and more, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Randy Feltface, Assembly George Square ★★★★ Despite being made of felt, with a gash for a mouth and two googly eyes, Randy Feltface (always seen in the vicinity of Heath McIvor) can, astonishingly, appear to emote. Of course, he can't – we are feeling the emotions – but in response to what Randy is saying, whether it's serious or silly. It's an astonishing trick to pull off, and McIvor does it brilliantly.Randy's latest outing, Alien of Extraordinary Ability, tackles some big subjects, not least what humans are doing to our planet, and how we have wasted the chance to reset that the Read more ...
David Nice
“Variety is the spice of life! Vive la difference!,” chirrups the ensemble at the end of this giddying double bill. And there could hardly be more singular variety acts than a potential suicide at the end of a phone line, a woman who lets her breasts fly away and grows a beard, and a husband who breeds 40,049 children on his own.Favourite Glyndebourne Director Laurent Pelly has gift-wrapped Poulenc’s two one-act one-offs with intelligence, verve and visual brilliance - which in the first case means semi-darkness, in the second all the colours of the rainbow - and conductor Robin Ticciati Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The gifted writer-director Stefan Golaszewski (Him and Her, Mum) has surpassed himself with his latest drama series, Marriage. Given hour-long episodes to play with, rather than the usual half-hour, he has created an unfeasibly rich four-parter out of the simplest of means.We are in Golaszewski’s usual world of bedded-in domestic routine, where characters often hide their feelings and assume it’s just what you do. It looks like a comedy of modern manners, but it’s a minefield. Tonally, it’s in gradations of beige, pale grey and watery green, both visually and emotionally; then, much like the Read more ...
Juliette Bretan
The businessman in Heinrich Maria Davringhausen’s Der Schieber (The Profiteer), 1920-1921 sits several floors above the city streets, pencil in hand; the high-rise buildings pressing at the windows around him. Not in Germany. In France.Across the sixth floor of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, framed by its spectacular floor-to-ceiling windows, a sprawling, multidisciplinary exhibition is currently on show, devoted to works by the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, active in Germany in the 1920s.In the aftermath of the First World War, avant-garde, utopian and idealistic styles Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ania Magliano, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Ania Magliano is debuting at the Fringe with Absolutely No Worries If Not, an hour that explores her sexual awakening. She has only recently realised she's bisexual, which means she still likes straight culture. “I think All Bar One is a great space,” she say drily.Magliano, an instantly likeable presence on stage, used to work in Lush – cue some cruel but very funny descriptions of those who work and shop there – and talks about her time at an all-girls boarding school. She describes the two kinds of girl it produces – those who had eating Read more ...