Reviews
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 ...
Gavin Dixon
It is mid-way through the new Ring cycle, and we are taking lunch outside the old town hall on the high street in Bayreuth. Discussion at neighbouring tables is intense: “The Ring is a child!”, “Why does Wotan have no spear?”, “The pyramid in the box – what is that all about?”The new production, by Austrian director Valentin Schwarz, is streamlined and modern. It clears away much of Wagner’s symbolism and reassigns the narrative to new and disparate ideas. The reception has been decidedly mixed, but many of the new concepts deserve careful consideration.The production, and the entire Bayreuth Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!, Summerhall ★★★★★ What a pleasure to be in the audience for this terrific musical whodunnit, about best friends Kathy (Bronté Barbé ) and Stella (Rebekah Hinds), who live in Hull and have a podcast devoted to “in-depth chat about murders”, the grislier the better. So when their heroine, crime writer Felicia Taylor (Jodie Jacobs) is decapitated shortly after they meet her, they set about finding her murderer.What follows is pure joy as the cast of five (three of them playing multiple roles) sing, dance and emote their way through a story littered with Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Danny Elfman – the punk rocker-turned-film composer behind Batman, Spider-Man, Edward Scissorhands and The Simpsons – reports that he felt sceptical when first approached to write for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Why? Simply because “they were a youth orchestra”. As Homer himself might say, “D’oh!”.Ask where Elfman has been hiding these last many decades and the answer is “Hollywood”. Tinseltown’s soundscapes (and sound-stages) lie unmissably behind the work that – duly enlightened about the NYOGB’s excellence – he went on to produce. Wunderkammer, named for the Romantic-era Read more ...