The gag – and it’s about as pitch-black a gag as you could imagine – is there in the title. Three African American guys hang out, shoot the breeze, chew the fat, discussing everything from pretty girls to who the best blues musician is. They bicker, disagree, pass on nuggets of wisdom and even sing an out-of-tune song or two, seemingly just to pass the time. But constantly interrupting their impromptu discussions are tortured, awkward movements, as the three lynched bodies hang together by their necks in deathly silence.Writer and director Zora Howard’s brief but potent show comes to Read more ...

There can be few more cultivated ways to spend a morning than with the chamber music of Francis Poulenc. The Gallic wit that’s so evident in his larger scale work is even more prominent in his music for the salon, where an arch smile or a sly wink seems to accompany almost every phrase. The wind soloists of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra understood this well in their Friday recital at the Queen’s Hall (★★★★★), the elegance and wit dialled up even further by the fact that these musicians play with one another all the time and know each other well. That meant that André Cebrián could bring Read more ...

Hi. I’m Steve, creator of the solo show bearing my name on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and I’d like to make something perfectly clear: I’m alive. I’m not dead.I’m nearly certain of that now, though there was a stretch when it became something of an open question. It was confusing. In some ways, it still is.Which is partly why I’m here in Edinburgh performing a one man show with the not especially subtle title Steve Burns: Alive. Over the years I’ve become considerably more confident about the nature of my continued existence. I eat. I sleep. I pay taxes. My knees hurt now for reasons I don Read more ...

It has taken until halfway through this year’s Edinburgh International Festival before we got to the first string quartet in the Queen’s Hall’s chamber music series, but when it came, the venue was packed to the gills. Maybe that’s the Sheku effect. Mr Kanneh-Mason (pictured below) was joining the Kleio Quartet to play one of the central pillars of the chamber music repertoire, Schubert’s String Quintet, so it’s hardly surprising that people came in their droves.  Image And it was worth it. This was the first time Kanneh-Mason had Read more ...

It’s been 35 years since Tony Kushner’s two-play, multi-hour epic gay soap opera-cum-spiritual meditation was first unleashed on the world in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it’s been 18 years since director Ivo van Hove unveiled his own raw, stripped-back production with what was then Toneelgroep Amsterdam, now Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. It’s tempting, therefore, to see the Edinburgh International Festival’s revival of van Hove’s production as a classic traversal of a classic text, with all the nicely safe distancing and detached appraisal that that double status might invite.That’ Read more ...

Several years ago, after a Queen’s Hall song morning, a fellow reviewer told me it was time we rethought the song recital, and that the old format of someone standing still while singing songs in German to an uncomprehending audience was way past its sell-by date. He should have been at this one, because Beth Taylor and Hamish Brown’s recital managed to turn the conventional song recital into a gripping piece of drama.Much of that, of course, was down to Taylor’s transfixingly unique voice. I’m always surprised that she is described as a mezzo-soprano, because the depth and richness of her Read more ...

This is Nicola Benedetti’s fourth opening concert while she has been in charge of the Edinburgh International Festival, and I suspect it might be the one she’s most proud of. That’s not (only) because it featured All Rise, the jazz symphony written by the superstar jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (who is also Benedetti’s husband), but because it seemed to unite all the things Benedetti has previously striven for in her opening concerts. Like the rest of them, this pushed the envelope beyond the standard western classical canon, combined diverse musical forces, and focused on themes of building Read more ...

There is, let’s be honest, a certain self-congratulatory self-satisfaction among some particularly well-heeled sections of the Edinburgh International Festival audience, event-goers who’ve forked out a fortune to be fed high culture carefully curated for them, and who either reside in some of the city’s most well-off districts or have perhaps travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles for the pleasure.Heck, a group in front of me were even discussing the merits of the city’s various private members’ clubs, and the intricate exclusionary processes for admission, while waiting for their Read more ...

Handel probably wrote his cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno in 1707 while he was in the service of the Marquis of Ruspoli in Rome. It tells the story of the shepherdess, Clori, who has two lovers that she plays off against one another to no great effect, everything culminating in an ending that’s suspiciously neat even by Handel’s standards.The Dunedin Consort (pictured below by Andy Catlin with John Butt in an earlier concert) are the best conceivable advocates for it, with their silky strings and star soloists, particularly Matthew Truscott’s fiendish violin obbligato and Toby Carr’s beguiling Read more ...

What new light can the age-old legend of Faust selling his soul to the devil shed on colonialism in Africa, slavery, the rape and destruction of the natural world, the exploitation and murder of the continent’s people? It’s a question you may well still be asking yourself after experiencing the visually spectacular but thematically opaque Faustus in Africa! from Cape Town-based Handspring Puppet Company and director/designer William Kentridge.There’s a lot to admire in the show, which arrives at the Edinburgh International Festival in a reworking of the company’s original 1995 production – Read more ...

There’s a lot to shout about in this Orpheus, especially the way it looks. In a thin year for staged opera at the Edinburgh International Festival, they’ve gone for an eye-popper with this staging of Gluck’s most influential work. Premiering at Australia’s Opera Queensland in 2019, its star attraction is the Brisbane-based Circa Ensemble, a group of acrobats, circus artists and physical performers whose antics light up the stage.As the opera begins, we see a solitary female performer suspended from the top of the proscenium who gradually dances, rotates and levitates her way to the stage Read more ...

Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynyuk crafted a fine programme for their EIF recital, centring around Brahms’ relationship with the Schumanns. He famously met them in 1853, when Robert Schumann declared him the next great thing in German music. The following year, however, Robert attempted suicide, launching a decline that lasted until his death. Brahms stayed close to Clara until her death in 1896, in response to which he wrote the Vier ernste Gesänge. The only “originally scored” thing on the programme (★★★★) was Brahms’ Second Cello Sonata, which Grynyuk and Elschenbroich Read more ...