Edinburgh
Veronica Lee
Carey Marx, Gilded Balloon **** Carey Marx couldn't come to the Fringe last year, because of the small matter of having a heart attack. But, looking on the bright side, the experience has given him his new show, Intensive Carey, in which the comic tells his story without a trace of self-pity and with a keen sense of the absurd.He's wonderfully honest about the lifestyle that led to the illness – during which we learn another use for a pair of socks when staying in hotel rooms – and the effects the procedures and medications may have had on his sex life (although he managed to masturbate Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
When first seen at Serge Dorny’s Opéra de Lyon in March-April this year, American Gary Hill’s unusual vision of Beethoven’s Fidelio could be recognised immediately as concept opera: drama where a director’s “idea” largely takes over the story. Hill directs (up to a point), and conceived the mesmerising projections that dominated the stage (realised, with jaw-dropping skill, by his technical assistant).Two ideas, culled from fragments of Beethoven’s ponderously-evolved libretto, dominate this production, revived at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre. First, that events take place on a futuristic Read more ...
caroline.boyle
The highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is undoubtedly Peter Doig’s No Foreign Lands. As you enter the beautifully proportioned and wonderfully hung rooms of the Scottish National Gallery (until 3 November) the spirit of last year’s Festival exhibition of European Symbolist Landscape seems still to linger and has found its modern echo.The rooms are flooded with colour and dramatic atmosphere. On large canvases the layers of colour appear to billow, bleed, swirl, drift and fade into one another, tonally quivering and shimmering. They awake spectral memories of other paintings from Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the past week or so has proven anything, it’s that feminism in 2013 has lost none of its power to inspire, anger and enthrall. Given the nature of the abuse meted out to those who raise their voices above the chorus, for Alan Bissett to turn his own feminist awakening into an hour-long show is brave, foolish or some combination of the two. But it’s not as if the author and playwright wasn’t prepared: long before Ban This Filth! was ready for an audience its central thread faced the toughest audience of all - Twitter.Part autobiography, part women’s studies class, Ban This Filth! is an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A lot has changed in the 10 years since Serge Dorny arrived at Lyon Opera. Attendance in a supposedly dying art form has risen to 96 per cent, and no charges of elitism or unfashionable nostalgia have deterred the 25 per cent of Lyon’s audiences who are now under 26 – Europe’s youngest opera-going crowd. But how has Dorny managed this, and at what cost? Is he really the Opera Whisperer or are his innovations just gimmickry, shiny bandages temporarily plugging a fatal wound?It’s a question that UK audiences will soon be able to answer for themselves as Dorny brings his latest and most Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Blondie are one of a handful of bands capable of producing a set list which renders rational critical argument all but obsolete. If they play the hits and they play them straight and true, there’s not really much to complain about. Last night in Edinburgh the six-piece line-up (half original members, half relative newbies) played (most of) the hits, and well, but let’s break it down to specifics.Five things you want to see at a Blondie concert1. Debbie Harry. A vision in peach with voice and sass intact, she remains a tough-but-tender front woman par excellence with charisma to burn. 2. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
He's back - and he's even moodier than before. Jackson Brodie, the private dick for whom the word “brooding” was invented, hasn't been seen on BBC One since 2011, and now there are three 90-minute films to feast on, based on Kate Atkinson's novels and relocated to Edinburgh. Last night's was Started Early, Took My Dog.The story started in Munich, where Brodie (Jason Isaacs) was involved in a child snatch that he was doing solely for the money, as he had just spent two months visiting his daughter Marlee, who now lives with her mother in New Zealand, and that costs. It all went wrong as his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Alexander McCall Smith is Scottish, and writes fiction, but he doesn’t write “Scottish fiction” as most of us understand the term. In his world view there are no used needles and discarded condoms littering tenement stairwells, no spotty hedonists popping pills to a blue-streaked soundtrack of effing and cussing. It seems extraordinary that no other author has hit upon his extraordinarily successful formula for shifting units in bookshops all over the world.Low on dead bodies and high on softly pedalled humour and lightly sprinkled moralising, the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agengy series of Read more ...
Michael Stephen Clark
Only an April fool would deny Emeli Sandé her right to rule as the home-grown pocket diva for the Smartphone generation. The current elfin queen of the UK pop charts took the stage in Edinburgh last night having already won over her capacity crowd on Amazon, i-Tunes and in miles of supermarket aisles.Her proclaimed heroines are Nina Simone and Alicia Keys, and both are audible in her output. Sandé can certainly sing to stir the senses, but can she move the soul? My suspicion is that beneath the polish of her long fingernails is a more engrained layer of spirituality. Songs like “Next to Me” Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Rick Redbeard has a pirate’s name and a voice like deep, dark water. Behind the colourful alter ego stands (or, as was the case last night, sits) Rick Anthony, singer of The Phantom Band, the Scottish six-piece whose two albums – Checkmate Savage and The Wants – have recently stretched the admittedly painfully limited parameters of contemporary rock music to thrilling extremes.The Phantom Band's sound is a manic tangle of folk, krautrock, doo-wop, post-rock, operatic excess and electro-pop kitsch. Anthony is not nearly as ambitious or eclectic when it comes to his own music, but the results Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is a problem with every single Richard Thompson concert and it is one of omission. With a songbook to rival the best in the business, every triumphant rendition of one song comes tinged with the knowledge that some other gem has been elbowed out of the way to make room for it. If you’re not careful you can spend the entire night curating an alternative, shadow concert in your head while failing to enjoy the evidence of your own ears or eyes.There was a bit of that last night in Edinburgh. Perhaps a little more than usual. There were times, when the likes of “Sidney Wells” and “If Love Read more ...
graeme.thomson
What is truth? Is it fixed or fluid, personal or universal? Does it require hard evidence or merely faith? These are the areas of interest poked and prodded in this co-production between the Traverse and Peepolykus, the company which previously brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the stage. The result is an eccentric romp through the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, a famously ridiculed figurehead for the spirit world in his later years, which ponders – none too deeply, but with immense good humour – the conflict between fideism and rationalism.Doyle’s story is presented here as an Read more ...