Reviews
Marianka Swain
It is no mean feat to turn an audience against idealistic, painfully young marines heading for the nightmarish hell of Vietnam, but Dogfight comes perilously close to achieving that undesirable goal in the manner of their introduction. The band of brothers have just one night of freedom in San Francisco before deployment, and how do they wish to spend it? Competing to see which of them can recruit the least attractive date in a so-called "dogfight", with the winner – if there can really be a winner in such a contest – pocketing a wad of cash. On the Town it is not.In fairness to Peter Duchan Read more ...
caroline.boyle
Like a canny political campaigner, the Edinburgh Art Festival offers “something for everyone”. In this singular year for Scotland, the festival weaves together strands concerning the independence referendum, the Commonwealth and the centenery of the beginning of the First World War. It also provides an introduction to a host of other ideas and artistic worlds. It's contemporary art that takes centre stage and its flagship is Generation. This multi-venue show takes over the imposing rooms of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art and is part of a Scotland-wide Read more ...
Marianka Swain
If comedy is tragedy plus time, either too much has elapsed since the fictional events of Jezebel, or not quite enough. Newcomer Mark Cantan's uneven screwball comedy pitting a methodical couple against a scatter-brained opposite with wacky misunderstandings aplenty, lacks the emotional heft to be more than genially inconsequential. And it's too enamoured of the old-fashioned TV sitcoms it references to subvert rather than merely replicate their well-worn tropes. Add a classic living-room set, direct address to camera - sorry, audience - and audible pauses for laugh track, and you get Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Geometric shapes move towards a coloured ball. You just have to move the ball and dodge the shapes. Easy. Were it not for one tiny detail, Duet might be almost too simple.Except.. there are two balls. The clue is in the title and the way you beat each level has as much to do with choreography as it does with lightning-fast twitch reactions.Your two balls, red and blue, are fixed on opposite sides of a thin ring and they move in concert. You rotate the ring clockwise or anti-clockwise by tapping and holding a finger on either side of the screen. In each level, white shapes move slowly towards Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mad Max script-doctored by Dostoyevsky: that’s how David Michod sees Australia after it all goes to hell. His first film, Animal Kingdom, rewired the gangster film as a suburban family horror story, sweaty with the threat and reality of violence. Michod’s debut as writer-director heads into the Outback, to make a post-apocalyptic road movie notable for steely reserve as much as swift, frequent mayhem."10 years after the collapse” is our dateline. As Eric (Guy Pearce) walks into a karaoke bar in the first minute (pictured right), clues to the catastrophe are already piling up. Bottles of water Read more ...
David Nice
“Ah now, I can’t promise you sun,” says a Scots lady-in-waiting of her native weather to a novice Englishwoman near the start of Rona Munro’s masterly James Plays. It’s the first of many references to make the audience laugh knowingly. Well, after four days of the worst weather Edinburgh Festivalgoers can remember, the sun came out yesterday morning. There’s no better place to be than the airy Queen’s Hall if you want an 11am recital of light and shade – and to say that of yesterday’s duo programme is an understatement. Come late afternoon, and the light was still dappling the green lawns and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Cuckooed, Traverse Theatre *****Mark Thomas's new show is in the theatre section of the Fringe brochure, but this hour, full of laughs and witty lines as it is, could easily be under the heading of comedy. Indeed, Thomas once made his living as a stand-up, even if his career has long defied any pigeonholing; professional irritant, activist and satirist are just a few job titles that could apply.Cuckooed is a masterful piece of storytelling and in an engrossing hour in which Thomas tells of how he – a master prankster – was duped by "Martin", a former comrade in Campaign Against Arms Trade. Read more ...
Florence Hallett
If the idealised human body forms the heart of the classical tradition in Western art, the close study of nature is its lifeblood. It is inevitable then that artists have sought better to understand anatomy, and there are many examples of artists whose knowledge of the human body was more than skin deep. A century or so ago, Henry Tonks’ early career as a surgeon was essential to the character of his work as a painter and draughtsman, while the corpse in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, is sufficiently accurate to suggest that Rembrandt had first-hand knowledge of a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie: An Ungrateful Woman, The Stand *****This is the “difficult second album” show for Bridget Christie, despite her having done 10 years at the Fringe. She finally found her voice at last year's festival, deservedly winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award after a raft of five-star reviews for her avowedly feminist show, A Bic for Her - but how do you follow that? With another five-star show, obviously.An Ungrateful Woman starts with Christie “confessing” that she expected last year's show, about everyday sexism, to fail to attract an audience - so then she would have an excuse to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The cover of her new album, I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss, has Sinéad O’Connor sporting a black wig and latex dominatrix dress, a glammed-up guitar wrapped in her arms. Well, at least she made the effort. On stage at the Roundhouse she launched her fine new album sans latex or hair, in black t-shirt and trousers, still the shaven-headed siren of unbidden passions and complicated yearnings.From "Nothing Compares" through to new songs such as the floor-pounding single "Take Me to Church", the lush "Vishnu Room", or the closing Tennessee Williams-referencing "Streetcars" – all of them strong Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Entering Wilderness is like stepping into the brain of Baz Luhrmann. It is a kaleidoscope of colours, swirling with noise and feathers, surreal in its array of vintage-bohemian-steampunk spectacle, and magical in its collaboration of the arts and nature.It is a great big fancy dress party – a chance for the middle-class masses to pour themselves into their finest, most psychedelic unitards and bejeweled headdresses, douse themselves in clouds of glitter, swathe themselves in sequins and get utterly decadent, letting their inner exhibitionist run wild for a weekend. They can watch music and Read more ...
ellin.stein
Director Ari Folman burst onto the scene with his brilliantly realised, quasi-autobiographical Waltz With Bashir, an animated feature that navigated between dreamscapes and reality to explore the personal trauma arising from witnessing the massacres at Lebanon’s Shabra and Shatila refugee camps as an Israeli soldier. His follow-up feature, The Congress, is highly original and fizzing with ideas. But without a similarly gripping central narrative to keep it anchored, it remains somewhat emotionally uninvolving, instead provoking the head-scratching conceptual interest of Inception or The Read more ...