Edinburgh
Veronica Lee
Alfie Moore: I Predicted a Riot, Pleasance Courtyard **** There can't be many serving police officers doing stand-up comedy at the Fringe, so that makes Alfie Moore an unusual beast. Actually he's a one-off, a wonderfully engaging bloke in a sharp suit who says the most surprising things for someone currently indentured to Her Majesty. He's left-leaning, for a start, having grown up on a Sheffield council estate and who started his working life in a steelworks, where he was a shop steward. Moore, who was on Show Me the Funny on ITV last year, is now a sergeant in Humberside Constabulary Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I, Tommy, Gilded Balloon **** Everybody will be familiar with Tommy Sheridan's story, and not necessarily because they closely follow Scottish politics at their most internecine. Rather because the Glaswegian socialist went from being barely a paragraph in broadsheets to being plastered over the front pages of tabloids after a series of revelations – which he strongly denies – about visiting swingers' clubs.It was once all so different, as Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison shows us in this amusing essay of Sheridan's rise and fall. The extremely charismatic Sheridan was adored by men Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jigsy, Assembly Rooms **** Les Dennis may have started his career as a comic, and then as a presenter of cheesy, family-friendly television game shows, but of late he has been plying his trade as a very decent actor. And so it proves again in Tony Staveacre's one-man play about a washed up Liverpudlian club comic.It's set in 1997 in a Liverpool working men's club, a beast that has mostly rolled over and died these days. Jigsy, florid of face and never seen on stage without a pint in his hand, does his two spots either side of the bingo. He has worked with some of the greats - Ken Dodd, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Magnus Betner, Assembly Rooms **** Here is the news: dismemberment, suicide bombers, industrial-strength Japanese porn, paedophilia and the descent of Julian Assange from hero to zero. The son of a priest and a superstar in his homeland, Swedish comic Betner is drawn to the dark stuff (come to think of it, there’s not much of a leap between Betner and bête noire), and his show latched on to the mood of post-Olympics comedown and held fast.“Show” is really the wrong word. Insisting he would rather die than do the same material every night, Betner places himself firmly as a comic outsider Read more ...
theartsdesk
Liam Mullone: A Land Fit For Fuckwits, Stand 4 **** Liam Mullone might perform his hour of clever, quietly simmering stand-up flanked by a faithful toy raccoon called Mr Eek, but there’s nothing fluffy about his material. Mullone targets knee-jerk liberalism with a steel toe-capped intellect. He takes it as read that the likes of the EDL are deeply unpleasant knuckleheads; it’s just that people who get their kicks by constantly pointing out the fact aren’t necessarily much better.Dressed in the ageless uniform of the terminally right-on bore – including copious lapel badges and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mies Julie, Assembly Hall **** Miss Julie is pretty full-on at the best of times but in Yael Farber’s striking new version, Strindberg’s themes of class and gender are given a shocking modern makeover. In transposing the action to present-day South Africa, she has written a story about the divide that still exists between the haves and have-nots, and the crippling emotional history that has yet to be overcome by the young nation.Twenty years after the end of apartheid, things haven’t changed much on a veldt farm, which is owned by a white man and whose labourers and maids are all black. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Towards the end of a ridiculously easy and enjoyable hour spent in their company, Flap!’s singer and ukulele player Jess Guille described “Rock in Space” as “jazz-folk-disco” – and, you know, it kind of was. A bawdy, slap-happy five-piece from Melbourne, their root note is pre-war American jazz, but to that foundation they add ska, gypsy music, blues, folk and flickers of more contemporary styles, mixing them all together with deceptive ease. And although their defining aim is to get the audience to laugh, dance (and drink), they can really play, too.Guille alternated lead vocals with Eamon Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Rosie Wilby: How (Not) to Make it in Britpop, Bongo Club *** In the 1990s Rosie Wilby was lurking on the outer edges of Britpop with her band Wilby, whose giddy career highlights included opening for Tony Hadley (he evacuated the entire room for the soundcheck), being clamped outside the venue while supporting Bob Geldof, and getting their own plastic name tag in the racks of Virgin Megastore.Her band were rated “enjoyable” in a 2000 Guardian review – Wilby back-projects the proof in case we don't believe her – and the same adjective applies to this hour-long show. It’s a bit of a curate Read more ...
caroline.boyle
East coast haar seeping into sun-drenched streets – familiar Edinburgh monuments disappearing dreamlike under blankets of mist, vibrant colour draining from the landscape as the city transformed into its more usual symphony in grey. The dramatic change in weather during the first weekend of the Edinburgh Art Festival has mirrored the overwhelming experience of one of this year’s major exhibitions.Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe, 1880–1910 is a joint project between the National Galleries of Scotland, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Camille O'Sullivan: Changeling, Assembly Rooms *****The Assembly Rooms may have reopened for this year's Fringe following a very swanky refurb, but someone obviously forgot to put sufficient thought into the practicalities of getting people in and out during the festival. The opening night of Camille O’Sullivan’s brief sold-out run started 40 minutes late after a chaotic queuing system apparently devised in tribute to MC Escher left much of the crowd – which, thrillingly, included Les Dennis – more than a little testy.It’s testament to O’Sullivan’s charisma and gifts as a performer that Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first thing that strikes you is the voice. At once coarse and warm, like the creak of the stairs of your childhood home as it settles in at night, Meursault’s Neil Pennycook sounds like a man with more than a few stories to tell. Of course it helps that, instrumentation-wise, Something for the Weakened is one of those musical "progressions" which sees the band abandon the programmed beats that punctuated earlier recordings in favour of a more conventional sound that knows when to play it sparse and when to swell, filling out beautiful melodies that top the five-minute mark in places. But Read more ...