Reviews
David Kettle
Lost Lear, Traverse Theatre ★★★★A rehearsal room; a tense preparation session for a production of King Lear, provocatively gender-swapped; a troublesome diva in the title role; and a near-silent understudy barely able to contribute.Dan Colley’s compelling ensemble piece has a big twist early on, then several further shifts in emphasis and direction that keep the audience guessing throughout, and which also force a reappraisal of everything you’ve just seen. But his central conceit offers apparently endless – and often contradictory – insights. Iconic Irish actor Joy is in a care home, where Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alison Spittle, Monkey Barrel ★★★Alison Spittle is fat, she tells us at the top of the show. But not as fat as she used to be. And that’s the premise of BIG, in which she describes why she has been overweight since she was eight years old and what led to the recent weight loss – “about an XL Bully’s-worth”.The Irish comic talks about the sexual abuse which prompted her weight gain as a child, but this is no misery memoir, as she goes on to talk about body positivity (cue some smart Lizzo and Adele gags), and even the “fat bitch” that punctuates so many everyday exchanges with Read more ...
David Kettle
You could distinctly hear the murmurs of recognition from the Edinburgh audience – responding to knowing mentions of the city’s Leith and Morningside areas, the building of Royal Bank of Scotland’s immense Gogarburn HQ, the institution’s towering greed and ambition – during James Graham’s epic new history of RBS, its single-minded CEO Fred Goodwin and the 2008 financial crisis that was unveiled at the Edinburgh International Festival.There are clearly still-fresh memories, unresolved issues, unhealed wounds about Goodwin’s decade in charge that transformed RBS into the biggest bank in the Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
A rare cloud form envelopes the headland and to the east and the west Folkestone is cut off from the known world. This mist shortens the visual range, drawing attention to the chalky soil, the sea gorse and the looping swifts. It also softly frames 18 site specific works of contemporary art that work in sympathy with this historic settlement. Folkestone is, as the Triennial shows, rich in local inspiration. One emblematic work is Oceans Tree of Life (all works 2025) by Jennifer Tee, installed above a coastal landslide known as the Warren (main picture). It is adjacent to a dig site where Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rhys Darby, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Rhys Darby, the New Zealand actor and comic best known as Murray Hewitt in Flight of the Conchords, is back at the Fringe after nearly a decade away with The Legend Returns.It’s an elaborate tale about the march of AI – “Fuck, that horse has bolted” – which, true to form, he tells with great warmth. There’s a mix of physical comedy, daft voices and impressions (from helicopters to electric cars) and silly storytelling, with a generous flow of gags – verbal, aural and physical – thrown in.The hour takes us on a journey involving tech bros, domestic Read more ...
David Kettle
I’m Ready to Talk Now, Traverse Theatre ★★★★There are, inevitably, certain challenges when reviewing a one-to-one immersive show that’s already pretty much sold out its entire Edinburgh Fringe run (though there are rumours of some last-minute additional tickets for I’m Ready to Talk Now being released). For a start, influencing potential audience members to buy or not buy a ticket goes almost entirely out the window. In addition, giving too much away might spoil the impact of Oliver Ayres’s brief, fragile but hugely powerful creation for those who have already booked.All that said, it’s the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One of the more interesting tracks on Paul Weller’s fascinating new cover versions album Find El Dorado is his interpretation of “When You Are a King,” originally a 1971 hit for White Plains, an ensemble which evolved from the touring version of “Let’s go to San Francisco” hitmakers Flowerpot Men. White Plains, it turns out, are represented on another new release.White Plains are on Chip Shop Pop - The Sound of Denmark Street 1970-1975 with the cascading, harmony drenched “Every Little Move She Makes,” the February 1971 non-charting A-side released between charting 45s “Julie do ya Love me” Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Powerful, Timeless, Inspiring” it says on the front cover of the programme-book for this year’s supposedly 297th Three Choirs Festival at Hereford. So please leave your frivolity at the cathedral door with your gun and your mobile phone.Richard Blackford has certainly taken the hint with his new cantata, The Black Lake, a studiously tearful, elevated distillation of Caradog Prichard’s One Moonlit Night, a coming-of-age novel about a Welsh boy born and brought up in the slate-quarrying village of Bethesda in north Wales just before and during the First World War. It’s a curious thing about Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Many readers and writers think of epistolary novels as old-fashioned, just as letter writing itself can seem a bit quaint nowadays. The genre became popular during the 18th and 19th centuries following the success of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) and of later Gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).Unsurprisingly, however, it began to fizzle out after the invention of the telephone. In 1984, the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg published her epistolary novel The City and the House (La città e la casa), and the action, such as it is Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Arvo Pärt was into his 40s before he made had his Big Musical Idea: simplicity. He has spent the subsequent half-century pursuing this ideal, largely through the religious choral music that has been dubbed Holy Minimalism. And in this year of his 90th birthday, the Proms gave the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir a late-night concert to celebrate this music – and the people turned out, in what was the best-attended late-nighter I can remember.The programme consisted of eight (plus an encore) small pieces by Pärt, alongside other pieces in similar vein, and one very much not. What was Read more ...
Gary Naylor
After 76 years, you’d have thought they could’ve come up with a better story! Okay, that’s a cheap jibe and, given the elusive nature of really strong books in stage musicals, not quite as straightforward as meets the eye.More of that later and, let’s be honest here, nobody is relaxing back into some of the country’s most comfy theatre seats expecting to attend the tale of Sweeney Todd, are they?No they’re not. Older punters – and there are a few at Chichester, especially at a matinée – will recall Fred and Ginger on the silver screen, spied through plumes of cigarette smoke, he as Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Floria (the superb Leonie Benesch: The Crown; The Teachers’ Lounge; September 5) is a nurse, working the severely understaffed night shift in a Zurich hospital. She is constantly doing three things at once, sanitising her hands, snapping her gloves on and off, measuring medications into syringes, finding veins for IVs and saying, endlessly, “Ich komme gleich” (I’ll be there soon) or “Have you pain on a scale of one to ten?”Swiss writer-director Petra Volpe’s film is compulsively watchable and brilliantly paced and edited, with an exceptional soundtrack by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All of Us Read more ...