Edinburgh
Veronica Lee
David Greig’s delightful Midsummer (a play with songs), opened at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 2008, was revived for last year’s Fringe and now provides a warming tonic for frozen winter nights in London. A knowing, modern romcom about two thirtysomething lost souls from opposite ends of Edinburgh who find each other over the midsummer weekend, it could just as easily serve as a love-letter from the playwright to the city of his birth.You don’t have to know Scotland’s capital to follow the plot, but you will get more laughs out of the evening - many of them wry - if you do (and anyway, a map Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was a month before Christmas and I was watching venerable folkies the Battlefield Band at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. Halfway through their set they played “Robber Barons”, a new song about the nefarious medieval practice of German feudal lords charging exorbitant tolls on traffic travelling on the Rhine; as the verses mounted, it moved – seamlessly, like all good folk songs – to expose the habits of the unscrupulous bankers of the early 21st century.The message was clear: times may change, but we are still at the mercy of a different kind of robber baron, lining his own castle with silver Read more ...
Veronica Lee
‘'You must see this show!” “You must not go to this show!” Faced with those exhortations from friends and colleagues who had already seen (and been quite shocked by) it, I of course go to Kim Noble Will Die at the Soho Theatre. I was trepidatious because they told me it includes film of him consuming dog food, vomiting, self-harming and doing an awful lot of ejaculating - not my idea of a chucklesome evening. But Kim Noble was once half of the award-winning, darkly surreal duo Noble and Silver (with Stuart Silver), who had several years of success at the Edinburgh Fringe, and this is his Read more ...
graeme.thomson
While we’re busy falling over ourselves in the rush to laud the latest beard-and-guitar export from Wisconsin tundra or Williamsburg tenement, it’s easier than ever to undervalue home-grown talent. Lau formed in 2006, a coming together of three British traditional musicians with outstanding individual pedigrees but little in the way of mystique. Featuring Orcadian Kris Drever on clear-blue vocals and beautifully fluid acoustic guitar, Oban-born Aidan O’Rourke on the fiddle, and token Englishman Martin Green, who proved there’s very little you can’t do on the accordion, Lau have won Best Band Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Passion, pain and loss: they are companions in life more faithful than many a lover. This duo of solo dramas by Stefan Golaszewski, which opened last night in London after success in Edinburgh, turns its perceptive gaze upon them through the eyes of both eager youth and desolate old age. Poignantly, true emotional maturity remains elusive.In the first piece, titled with apt adolescent awkwardness Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved, it is 1999 and Stefan is an 18-year-old gap-year student doing work experience backstage at The Lion King. He’s hanging out in a pub with his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
"It was more than just 'I love you'," Suzanne Farrell, America's nonpareil ballerina, the love and inspiration of 20th-century ballet's greatest choreographer, is telling me at breakfast in a little bar in Lee, Massachusetts. "When people ask me to explain about George Balanchine and myself, I can't put it into words. As Mr B said, 'You don't ask a rose to explain itself.' Some things are unexplainable. Perhaps if you analysed it, you would destroy it."On her 15th birthday, this ballet-crazy Cincinnati girl auditioned in New York for Balanchine, the world-famous choreographer-director 41 Read more ...