Reviews
Veronica Lee
Rob Auton, Assembly Roxy ★★★★ The stage is littered with 30-odd large white cards bearing words such as “love”, “believe” and “push”. Rob Auton comes on stage and tells us he’s CAN, a former motivational speaker, and in the following 60 minutes of CAN (An Hour-Long Story) we hear his tale.As ever with Auton, he draws us in, peppering the story with lots of clever gags and asides, and even the odd groaner. His shows are mix of performance poetry, spoken word and storytelling, and he has a knack of looking at things from a different angle, prompting us to look at things anew.For Read more ...
David Nice
“Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night,” quoth Blake. Beethoven and Bartók knew both extremes, but Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra led us from the most dancing of Seventh Symphonies to the endless night of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, from explosive A major to quietest C sharp minor. If not everything along the way was perfect, or even in one major case present, the outlines were bold and engaging.Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was the last major work I heard at the Pärnu Music Festival only a fortnight ago. It bears repeating that young Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Wilderness is the kind of festival where you can overhear a conversation about the philosophical implications of rewilding whilst queuing for Veuve Clicquot, or watch a man dressed as a vicar strip naked mid-cricket match without anyone blinking. It is, in every sense, deeply decent – equal parts bougie and bonkers, like a country house party that accidentally invited in the circus, the club kids, and a few stray shamans.This year’s gathering was a reminder of how the annual arable revel in Cornbury Park has become the gold standard for sophisticated summer merrymaking. And golden it was, Read more ...
Simon Thompson
NYO2 is a group of dazzlingly talented (and terrifyingly young-looking) 14-17 year olds from the USA, one of Carnegie Hall’s three national youth ensembles, and with a focus on supporting young musicians from communities that are under-represented in the arts. This Edinburgh International Festival concert marked their European debut, and they’re doing a miniature residency in Edinburgh that, in another concert, involves them playing alongside some talented young Scots. Whatever their age, they can certainly play. Perhaps the only concession to their inexperience came from conductor Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Monstering the Rocketman by Henry Naylor, Pleasance Dome ★★★★Henry Naylor doesn’t hold back in his latest Fringe offering, an entertaining monologue in which he examines The Sun’s treatment of Elton John in the 1980s, an era when tabloids reigned supreme in the UK media – and trust in them started to erode.Against an onstage projection of screaming tabloid headlines from the era, Naylor tells the tale through the eyes of a keen young reporter hoping to make his mark in his first week at The Sun, then edited by the abrasive Kelvin MacKenzie – “The most foul-mouthed man in Britain” as Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.Johanne’s lengthy voiceover relates her romantic awakening first by a French novel then her new French teacher, the felicitously named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Johanne emotionally shoots up fast as she feels Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Even more perhaps than straight theatre, opera seems to draw attention to the meaning behind what may on the face of it appear a simple story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the story, with all its realistic impedimenta, can be simply ignored or reconfigured, as has alas too often been the case.In this 2021 production of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova, Damiano Michieletto took a middle road in the debate. He abandoned all suggestion of locale: no river Volga, no house, no garden, practically no weather, everything played in a uniform quasi-interior (designer Paolo Fantin) framed only by blank Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alexandre Dumas’ novel has been filmed an immeasurable number of times (there was a new French version only last year) and televised even more frequently (a Mexican incarnation materialised in 2023). Yet the world still can’t get enough, so here’s another one, this time a French/Italian production with a polyglot Euro-cast.Apparently much of it was shot in Malta, where the golden Mediterranean light illuminating antique stone towers and ramparts stands in very picturesquely for Dumas’ Marseille. The original novel clocks in at about 1200 pages in most versions – I tried reading it on a Kindle Read more ...
David Kettle
Lost Lear, Traverse Theatre ★★★★A rehearsal room; a tense preparation session for a production of King Lear, provocatively gender-swapped; a troublesome diva in the title role; and a near-silent understudy barely able to contribute.Dan Colley’s compelling ensemble piece has a big twist early on, then several further shifts in emphasis and direction that keep the audience guessing throughout, and which also force a reappraisal of everything you’ve just seen. But his central conceit offers apparently endless – and often contradictory – insights. Iconic Irish actor Joy is in a care home, where Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alison Spittle, Monkey Barrel ★★★Alison Spittle is fat, she tells us at the top of the show. But not as fat as she used to be. And that’s the premise of BIG, in which she describes why she has been overweight since she was eight years old and what led to the recent weight loss – “about an XL Bully’s-worth”.The Irish comic talks about the sexual abuse which prompted her weight gain as a child, but this is no misery memoir, as she goes on to talk about body positivity (cue some smart Lizzo and Adele gags), and even the “fat bitch” that punctuates so many everyday exchanges with Read more ...
David Kettle
You could distinctly hear the murmurs of recognition from the Edinburgh audience – responding to knowing mentions of the city’s Leith and Morningside areas, the building of Royal Bank of Scotland’s immense Gogarburn HQ, the institution’s towering greed and ambition – during James Graham’s epic new history of RBS, its single-minded CEO Fred Goodwin and the 2008 financial crisis that was unveiled at the Edinburgh International Festival.There are clearly still-fresh memories, unresolved issues, unhealed wounds about Goodwin’s decade in charge that transformed RBS into the biggest bank in the Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
A rare cloud form envelopes the headland and to the east and the west Folkestone is cut off from the known world. This mist shortens the visual range, drawing attention to the chalky soil, the sea gorse and the looping swifts. It also softly frames 18 site specific works of contemporary art that work in sympathy with this historic settlement. Folkestone is, as the Triennial shows, rich in local inspiration. One emblematic work is Oceans Tree of Life (all works 2025) by Jennifer Tee, installed above a coastal landslide known as the Warren (main picture). It is adjacent to a dig site where Read more ...