Reviews
David Kettle
Dark Noon, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★★If there’s a more ambitious theatre production than Dark Noon at the Fringe this year, I’ve yet to see it. That’s ambitious in terms of its staging: during the course of the show’s 100 minutes (yes, it’s a proper, full-length production), virtually an entire town is constructed on a bare red-earth stage right before our eyes. But it’s also ambitious in terms of its themes and subject matter. This is the history of the Wild West, the great American push to the Pacific, frontier pioneers, gold rushes and the law of the gun. It’s a world of corruption Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any surprises which Jump for Joy brings aren’t about the nature of the music or the unfailingly open lyrics recounting Hiss Golden Messenger main-man M.C. Taylor’s outlook on his life, but an intermittent undertone suggesting he’s been considering the rhythmic foundations of The War On Drugs. In the sixth song, “Jesus is Bored” there’s a hint of WOD’s fondness for a chugging, insistent tempo. It’s more to the fore on eighth track “Feeling Eternal.”In essence though, Jump for Joy adroitly showcases the mélange the North Carolina-based Taylor has perfected. In the studio here with his touring Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix scooped up the rights to an armful of Harlan Coben’s standalone novels for a colossal sum, and now Amazon Prime has nipped in and signed up Coben’s series of Mickey Bolitar books, which fall under the “young adult” heading. Shelter is the first one off the blocks.We find our hero, the aforementioned Bolitar, as he’s struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of a road accident four months earlier which killed his father, Brad, and has left his mother in hospital convalescing from the emotional trauma. Mickey, now staying with his aunt Shira, is just starting at high school in Read more ...
David Kettle
The Insider, ZOO Southside ★★★★Uncovered and investigated in 2017, the Cum-Ex scam was a complex tax fraud that stole billions from the coffers of several European countries. Its principal was simple (well, fairly simple): companies would claim tax refunds on dividend payments for shares apparently owned across several territories, and therefore theoretically taxed more than once. The reality, however, was that the shares had simply been loaned, then returned: smart lawyers and accountants had discovered a loophole for claiming back money that had never been paid in the first place. Read more ...
Alice Brewer
Always Open Always Closed is Caitlin Merrett King’s first published work of fiction, and it begins paratactically, with a list of displacements:MS REAL FEELS POSITIONLESS At her desk in the studio (not as often as she would like) or at the kitchen table or sofa, or at a kitchen table or at some else’s desk or in the pub or in Pollokshields Library (most often). Where she is situated, there you will find Ms Real staring, scrolling distracted, turning her phone over like a peach in her palm sliding it behind her laptop to avoid further frustration. Peach 15 minutes 5 minute break another 15 Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
A performance of Olivier Messiaen’s kaleidoscopic Turangalîla-Symphonie is always going to be a bit of an event. The Edinburgh International Festival set this one up nicely by making it not only the impressive culmination of a four-concert residency by the London Symphony Orchestra, but also the centrepiece of a group of Messiaen-themed performances.These included a separate concert, earlier in the evening, which juxtaposed Debussy’s La Mer and Milhaud’s La création du monde in a programme described as The Road to Turangalîla, and the previous day a performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the Read more ...
David Kettle
A toy car – in fact, a mobile home with comically enormous antenna on top – shudders over arms and shoulders as if they were mountain ranges. A colossal polar bear comforts its curious cub. A lifesize puppet grandmother is chased up and down stairs by her over-enthusiastic stairlift.There’s a lot of humour, and of exquisite beauty, in this brief, ephemeral collaboration between two Belgian puppetry and mime companies, Focus and Challiwaté, at the International Festival. The overarching narrative – such as it is – involves a trio of characters (maybe reporters, possibly archivers, at least Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Blue Beetle is DC’s first screen Latino superhero, a recent development in the history of a D-grade character summed up here in his own film as “like the Flash… or Superman… but not as good”. Scraping the character barrel and first meant for cable, his debut also resists the grim “adult” gravitas routinely borrowed from Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s Eighties comics, popping with bright colours and breezy, communal humanity.Jamie Reyes (Xolo Maridueña, pictured below) is our teenage hero, forced to give up post-college ambitions when his family home is threatened with repossession in Palmera Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The final track of Giant Steps is titled “The White Noise Revisited.” Its lyrics recount the crushing impact of a job where you “kill yourself at work for what seems nothing at all.” After coming home, “you listen to the Beatles and relax and close your eyes.”Inevitably, as it was also a double album with a similarly hop-scotch approach to musical styles, the newly reissued Giant Steps was bracketed with The Beatles’ eponymous double album from 1968; what was dubbed “The White Album.” Little needs saying about what’s in the grooves of the wonderful Giant Steps on the occasion of its 30th- Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This concert, the Edinburgh International Festival debut of the Castalian Quartet, almost didn’t happen due to the illness of their second violin, Daniel Roberts. Then, a couple of days ago, in stepped Yume Fujise, leader of the Kleio Quartet, to save the day, which is no mean feat considering that this programme featured both a world premiere and the knottiest of Beethoven’s late quartets.She did a terrific job, though (Fujise pictured below), as did the other three. In fact, they built the programme around that premiere, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Awake. Turnage’s inspiration came from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite its cursory nods to new technology, there’s something deliciously old-fashioned about Only Murders in the Building. Now into its third series, it tells the stories of a trio of affluent Manhattanites who make true-life podcasts about the mysterious deaths that occur in their palatial Upper West Side apartment building.It’s a grandiose pile designed in Italian Renaissance style, and its name, The Arconia, makes it sound more like an ocean liner than a block of flats. You could imagine bumping into Myrna Loy and William Powell in the lobby.The leading threesome comprises veteran actors/ Read more ...
David Kettle
Maureen, House of Oz ★★★★Make yourself comfortable – we’ll be here for a while. That’s what our host, 80-something Maureen, advises us several times during the course of her unhurried, hypnotically vivid reminscences of a life lived to the full. The era-defining, population-shifting changes she’s witnessed across her home neighbourhood of King’s Cross, Sydney. The teenage lover who disappeared into the turmoil of World War Two and returned changed forever. The soulmate whose death celebrations she staged with exquisite care. The little black book in which she records the dates of Read more ...