sat 04/05/2024

Edinburgh Festival

Edinburgh International Festival 2019: Colin Currie Group, BBCSSO, Dausgaard/DiDonato, NYO-USA, Pappano

With Peter Gynt, the National Theatre’s “reboot” of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, topping the drama bill at the Edinburgh Festival hotfoot from London, it was almost obligatory to find a space somewhere in the music programme for Grieg’s famous incidental...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2019 reviews: Sea Sick / Vigil / When the Birds Come

Sea Sick CanadaHub ★★★★   She’s not a performer, Alanna Mitchell tells us. She’s a writer and journalist. But what she’s discovered about climate change, and specifically about its effects on the world’s oceans, has...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2019 reviews: Deer Woman / Pathetic Fallacy / Blind Date

Deer Woman CanadaHub ★★★   You can feel the fury emanating from the stage in Tara Beagan’s incendiary solo play. Fury at the thousands of Indigenous Canadian women and girls who have gone missing in recent decades, abducted...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2019 review: Birth

Physical theatre company Theatre Re are virtually Fringe royalty these days, with a several-year history of fine shows under their belts, plus success internationally and at the London Mime Festival. And judging by their assured and richly resonant...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2019 review: Crocodile Fever

Chekhov famously pronounced that if you’re going to bring a gun on stage, you’ve got to use it. Is the same true for a chainsaw? To discover the answer, just head along to Meghan Tyler’s wild, over-the-top, gruesome Crocodile Fever at the...

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Edinburgh International Festival 2019 review: La reprise

Who’d have thought a play about a homophobic hate crime could be so much fun? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a little. But there are certainly lighter moments in La reprise, provocative Swiss-born director Milo Rau’s production with his...

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Edinburgh Festival 2019 review: Rich Kids - A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran

You can’t question Javaad Alipoor’s ambition. Ancient Mesopotamian empires, geological layers of chicken bones, the half-life of polysterene cups, Thomas Gainsborough, Susan Sontag, Iranian political history, gold iPhones, mallwave – all that and...

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Edinburgh Festival 2019 reviews: Below the Blanket / Samson Young: Real Music

Below the Blanket ★★★★  There’s a deep vein of melancholy running through Glasgow producing house Cryptic’s promenade installation Below the Blanket, which currently occupies several sites across Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden....

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Edinburgh Festival 2019 reviews: Enough / Spliced

Enough ★★★★   Immaculately turned out in winning smiles, navy and nylon, cabin crew Jane and Toni dispense comforting reassurance and flirty glances to passengers at 30,000 feet. Down on the ground, though, they’re juggling kids...

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Edinburgh International Festival 2019: Mahler's 'Resurrection' Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel - detailed judgment day canvas

Since time immemorial the Edinburgh International Festival has started with a juicy choral epic designed to show off the Festival Chorus and the opulent Usher Hall. So this performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony would normally have been billed as...

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The Prisoner, National Theatre review - Peter Brook's latest falls sadly flat

Of the Edinburgh International Festival’s three productions by 2018’s resident company, Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, The Prisoner is the most gnomic, the most baffling, and, frankly, the most disappointing. Which is a great shame,...

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Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: Home / The Prisoner

 Home ★★★★   Philadelphia-based theatre artist Geoff Sobelle has scored highly with two previous Edinburgh Fringe shows. Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, way back in 2010, imagined the natural world wreaking ruthless...

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