Alright Sunshine, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★Edinburgh writer Isla Cowan’s deceptively powerful solo show begins as an almost affectionate tribute to the city’s Meadows, fittingly just a few minutes down the road from the show’s venue – its yummy Morningside mummies taking their offspring to nursery, its chilled-out yoga groups, its joggers and gaggles of students hunched around disposable barbecues. By the show’s blazing close, however, the Meadows has become a place of violence and trauma, and the play has transformed into a blistering howl of fury and frustration at women’s conflicted role in the Read more ...

The original Naked Gun series (spun off from the Police Squad! TV show) brought reliable belly-laughs to the Eighties and Nineties and starred the incomparable Leslie Nielsen as the preposterous detective Frank Drebin, but for this regenerated version Liam Neeson has stepped up to the plate.Neeson has become synonymous with his celebrated “very particular set of skills”, though farce and light comedy have not usually been among them (we perhaps tend to associate him more with savage revenge dramas). Nonetheless, he successfully raises a few chuckles here.He plays Frank Drebin Junior, son of Read more ...

Readers of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel will be familiar with its themes of war, extreme suffering, ageing, memory, fidelity and infidelity, as it roves over the decades from World War Two to the late Eighties.Flanagan based much of the book on his father’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, forced to work as a slave labourer building the Burma railway, and his experiences are rendered in hellish detail by director Justin Kurzel in cahoots with screenwriter Shaun Grant. Kurzel’s younger brother Jed composed the show’s haunting and regretful soundtrack, a key Read more ...

According to the programme, Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra is heard somewhere around the world every other week. In which case I’ve been unlucky in never having heard it live before, despite being a fan for nearly 30 years. So I was relieved that last night’s Prom’s outing – in Tadaaki Otaka’s farewell with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, after a 40 year collaboration – didn’t disappoint.The playing was urgent, colourful and glorious  - everything I could have wanted. Completed in 1945, the Concerto is a direct descendant of Bartók’s, and this came over loud and clear in the Read more ...

Following confirmation that he was the owner of the bones found in a Leicester car park in 2012, Richard III has never been a hotter, or cooler, subject. So his fans will welcome a new play, based on an old book, about the misrepresentation of his character. The uninitiated, possibly not so much.The old book in question is Josephine Tey’s much loved The Daughter of Time (1951), in which a bored Scotland Yard type, Alan Grant (Rob Pomfret, pictured below right), bed-bound for six weeks with a broken leg, passes the time teasing out the truth (the “daughter of time”) about Richard: his Read more ...

Would Jamie Lloyd's mind-bending revival of Evita win through twice in four weeks, I wondered to myself, paraphrasing a Tim Rice lyric from his 1978 collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber?This is the first Lloyd Webber musical I ever saw in its original production on Broadway, which is to say the storied Hal Prince staging that brought Tonys to all concerned, including co-stars Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.But could my visceral response at a press preview be equalled several weeks later once all involved had settled into their (too-short) run? As the show itself puts it in a different Read more ...

As the nation basks in the reflected glory of The Lionesses' Euro25 victory, it could hardly be more timely for the Southwark Playhouse to launch a new musical that tells the tale of The Maiden. That was the boat, built and sailed by Tracy Edwards and her crew of resourceful, resilient women, in the Whitbread Round The World Yacht Race 1989, the first such crew to finish the gruelling challenge.It’s hard to credit now, but women, you know, that demographic that do childbirth, were once deemed too fragile for many sports. The first woman allowed to ride the Grand National, Charlotte Brew, only Read more ...

It’s not foregrounded, but as Strangest Feeling beds in after repeated listens it becomes clear that one of its core traits is The Pixies-originated quiet-loud, soft-hard dynamic which oozed into grunge. The second LP from the Irish-born, Sydney dwelling Bonnie Stewart isn’t a grunge album, but it has a kindred sensibility.Take third track “Bittersweet”. It has a My Bloody Valentine / Pale Saints haziness but as a verse gives way to the chorus – boom, an explosion. The voice is folky, lilting, the melodies honeyed. Yet Stewart likes offsetting this with flare-ups indicating that – presumably Read more ...

Life-changing? That's how the Pärnu Music Festival felt on my first visit in 2015, alongside the discovery of Estonia as a pillar of the European Union ideal. It’s also how Palestinian Lamar Elias, a student on the annual conducting course, described Paavo Järvi’s Beethoven Seven this year with his Estonian Festival Orchestra: a typical high repeated the next night with Arvo Pärt’s Credo to follow.Sadly the great Neeme Järvi, 88, who gave the controversial 1968 premiere of Credo, Pärt's large-scale testament of faith and seminal break with serialism and complexity, in Soviet Estonia Read more ...

There’s a deal to be made when taking your seat for The Winter’s Tale. It’s one the title alone would have signalled to the groundlings as much as those invited to rattle their jewellery upstairs back in the 17th century – it’s a fairytale, a fantasy, a funny-peculiar play. Perhaps the only play outside pantomime in which a bear gets involved. The plot breaks into two halves and, whether you know that the sun will literally and metaphorically shine after the interval or not, the dark opening scenes can drag. Essentially we’re witness to what would, these days, be called a psychotic Read more ...

What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.After a transgressive, life changing trip to London from school in Scotland to see Chuck Berry at The Rainbow, Simon Parkes wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. He was soon spitting out the silver spoon (but he never lost the easy charm and ironclad self-confidence that clings to the privately educated, a trait he cheerfully calls upon as and when) and Read more ...

This Prom began in sombre and melancholic shades of grey. Then, as her encore, the superb Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili launched into Liszt’s Paganini étude, “La Campanella”, and bells of long-awaited joy rang around the Royal Albert Hall. Under those leaping acrobatic fingers, musical sunshine drove away the clouds.Planned or not, these drastic contrasts prepared the ground for the volatile monster to come: Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, with its huge lurches and topples from darkness to light, and back again.Ryan Wigglesworth conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He began with Read more ...