Reviews
Nick Hasted
This is a romantic historical epic with elan, giving sensual immediacy to a fanciful secret history of the Eiffel Tower, here inspired by a forbidden, rekindled romance between Gustave Eiffel (Romain Duris) and Arlette Bourgès (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey).Director Martin Bourboulon evokes belle epoque Paris’s bustling modernity, suffused with a golden gaslit glow or fogged with shadow, as middle-aged widower and brilliant, honoured engineer Eiffel arrows through his working day. Already responsible for the Statue of Liberty’s internal structure, he now wants to build the Metro for the 1889 Read more ...
David Kettle
Temping, Assembly George Square Studios ★★★★Sarah Jane is away in Hawaii. But don’t worry – she’s left plenty of instructions for your day temping in the actuaries’ office, checking voicemails, answering emails, updating spreadsheets. After all, it’s just numbers – it’s not like you’ll be dealing with people’s lives or anything.New York-based Dutch Kills Theater’s immersive, one-audience-member, performer-less show ushers you into a lovingly recreated workspace, all stress balls and cute family photos, and then sets you to work. To say more would spoil the surprise, but it’s a remarkably Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s first two features were horror films with bells on, their genuinely creepy chills accompanied by sharp, satirical social comment. Both were so good that there seemed absolutely no reason to doubt the next. And for a time, Nope actually feels like a step up, a flexing of the muscles that adds (as many have already, accurately, pointed out) a Spielbergian sense of wonder and spectacle to yet another brilliant conceit. It’s a surprise, then, when Peele doesn’t sustain the magic, and this outing descends into something of a mess – an engaging, far-out Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Afghanistan Is Not Funny, Gilded Balloon ★★★★ Henry Naylor’s Arabian Nightmares trilogy - about the West’s misadventures in Syria and Iraq and how we have learned nothing - were hits at previous festivals; now he presents this new show, which looks back at where his interest in the troubled part of the world began 20 years ago, when he visited Afghanistan with photographer Sam Maynard to research what become the 2003 Fringe show Finding Bin Laden. Naylor is great storyteller, and he recounts how he and Maynard got into all sorts of scrapes, including when they were Read more ...
David Kettle
Every Word was Once an Animal, Zoo Southside ★★★★Ghent-based theatre company Ontroerend Goed have been prodding and provoking Fringe audiences for years, sometimes forcefully – as in 2001’s controversial, confrontational, crowd-baiting Audience – or more gently, as in 2019’s creation/destruction climate-change palindrome Are we not drawn onwards to new erA.The Covid pandemic is the unspoken issue hovering behind their 2022 show, on which they collaborate with fellow Fringe veteran Shôn Dale Jones. Their intended premiere of 5 April (presumably 2020, though it’s never spelt out) didn’t take Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The last-minute indisposition of your leading lady is enough to give festival directors palpitations, let alone their audiences, now forewarned by the dreaded email thudding into inboxes. And so it was that Andrew Moore, Head of Music at the Edinburgh International Festival, had to poke his nose through the stage curtain and announce that Natalya Romaniw was unable to sing the title role of Rusalka, which would instead be sung by fellow Welsh soprano Elin Pritchard.Yet any fears that this would in any way be an inferior substitution were unfounded – Pritchard has covered the role at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Monkey Barrel ★★★★Wearing a heavily sequinned leotard - she thought this was how we’d all dress after “living in trackies during lockdown” - Kiri Pritchard-McLean wants to address some very serious subjects, such as racism, imperialism and white privilege. But first she wants to deliver some funnies, and there are lots of them in Home Truths, a show bursting with energy and ideas.She’s a proud Welshwoman (the leotard has the Welsh flag on it, and she performs in front of a sign reading Môn Mam Cymru - Anglesey, mother of Wales) and, having moved back a few Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Ulster Orchestra’s Prom finished early to accommodate a late-night concert by the esteemed Tredegar Band – but by then, we’d already enjoyed one spectacular brass showcase. Under its justly-praised chief conductor Daniele Rustioni (formerly assistant to Antonio Pappano at Covent Garden), the Belfast-based outfit crackled and glowed in every department but especially at the back, where a robust, assured and often lyrical brass team delighted a virtually full house.Four mostly familiar and well-loved works; no interval; a closing time of 8.35pm that left the option of a leisurely supper in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Has the pandemic made us more angry? Although Francesca Martinez’s debut play, which is at the National Theatre, was programmed before COVID, its belated opening has not dampened the playwright’s fiery criticism of the effects of Tory government austerity on the lives of people with disabilities.As you’d expect from the writer – who is an award-winning comedian, actor, author of What the **** Is Normal? and has cerebral palsy (though she prefers the word “wobbly”) – All of Us is written in a deeply committed and compassionate way, but although I agree with its political points, and am moved Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Colin Hoult: The Death of Anna Mann, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★★ Anna Mann – actress, singer, welder (you’ve got to have a back-up in this business, darling) – is the monstrous creation of Colin Hoult.She was last seen at the Fringe five years ago and now returns, but with sad news; she’s dying, her heart being “just too full”. As she nears the end, Anna gives us a potted biography – she describes her poor upbringing in Nottingham where her only toy was a stick, her many marriages and affairs with ridiculously named suitors, her daughter Mahogany and her, er, stellar acting career, Read more ...
mark.hudson
In later life Gustav Metzger appeared a marginal, eccentric figure. The diminutive, white-bearded artist, was often to be seen round London’s galleries in the early to mid-2010s, dropping off piles of hand-produced fliers urging his fellow artists to “remember nature”.I’ve got one somewhere, a rudimentary dog-eared photocopy, announcing that “Gustav Metzger is calling on all creative professionals and students to create a worldwide movement across the arts to ward off extinction.” Anyone not in on the story of the seminal 1965 Auto-Destructive Art symposium, when Metzger immolated his own Read more ...
David Kettle
The Last Return, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★ Put a leafless tree prominently on stage – especially in an Irish play from an Irish company – and you’re asking for parallels to be drawn. And indeed, there’s a god-like figure that the characters in Sonya Kelly’s brilliant, scabrous comedy are waiting for – someone called Oppenheimer, who, of course, never appears. More specifically, it’s tickets for Oppenheimer’s Return to Hindenburg (a play? an opera? something else entirely? who knows?) that a ragtag and increasingly bizarre collection of punters are desperately seeking, each with their own life- Read more ...