Groomed Pleasance Dome ★★★★
“How can a truth be told? How can a secret be spoken?” Patrick Sandford asks in Groomed, his searingly honest account of his experience of abuse by a teacher at primary school several decade ago. Over 50 minutes he recounts his tale, weaving in other stories to illuminate his own.
FOOD, The Studio ★★★
There’s no denying it: Los Angeles-born Geoff Sobelle is a theatrical magician (quite literally – it’s how he began his career). Through a string of visually spectacular shows on the Fringe and more recently at the International Festival, he’s unleashed wildlife into the streets of Edinburgh, drawn aeons of history from a cardboard box, and even constructed an entire house on stage.
Heaven, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★
Stuntman, Summerhall ★★★★★
The Death and Life of All of Us, Summerhall ★★★★
Victor Esses was 16 when he first discovered his grandmother had a sister – someone the family had never discussed. It was just a year after his own first illicit visit to a gay sauna.
At first, it’s hard to believe that the true story of Colonel Blood’s audacious attempt to steal The Crown Jewels from the Tower of London in 1671 has not provided the basis for a play before. After two hours of Simon Nye’s pedestrian telling of the tale as a comedy, you have your answer.
A new theatre? In 2023? Now there’s a shot in the arm for the post-pandemic gloom. But there’s no business like show business – not for Mayfield Lavender anyway, who have found a corner of one of their beautiful purple fields and built an outdoor theatre for the poor, neglected souls of er… Epsom – but any investment in arts is surely welcome in these most philistine of times.
The shadow of Grenfell Tower has already produced Nick Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor’s dispassionately forensic but devastating documentary plays based on transcripts from the Grenfell Inquiry. Now comes a companion piece, the National’s Grenfell, a verbatim play using excerpts from the same source, but larded by Gillian Slovo into a wider account of the fire by those who were in it, to equally wrenching effect.
Plays chronicling the unscrupulous collision of high finance and big tech seem 10 a penny these days. Some writers, such as Joseph Charlton, seem to have built entire careers around telling glossy tech morality tales (for my money the best in this burgeoning genre is Sarah Burgess's Dry Powder staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2018 starring Hayley Atwell).
Came for the music, returned for the theatre. I oversimplify: Riccardo Muti’s Roads of Friendship events, meetings of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra with players from other places – since 1997, they have included Sarajevo, Lebanon, Kenya, Iran and this year Jordan – will always be the big cornerstones of the Ravenna Festival.