Edinburgh Fringe
Veronica Lee
On the Other Hand, We’re Happy Summerhall ****This affecting co-production between Paines Plough and Theatr Clywd of Daf James’s play takes a sideways look at adoption.Twentysomethings Abbi (Charlotte Bate) and Josh (Toyin Omari-Kinch) have been together for almost their entire lifetime. They’re solid, so it’s a shock when they can’t have a biological child, and they decide to adopt.The long drawn-out nature of the adoptive process is neatly essayed here, with endless discussion about what kind of child they wish/will be allowed to adopt, and the pitfalls to be avoided. One wrong step and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Clive Anderson Assembly George Square ****Clive Anderson has obeyed the Fringe comedy gods and given his debut solo show a title and a theme. Actually, Me, Macbeth & I is mostly just him talking very amusingly for an hour about his days in the Cambridge Footlights, his dual careers in law and on television - and that interview with the Bee Gees.He’s a fantastic raconteur, even if he does have a verbal tic of “Oh I must just mention this”, or “Before I tell you that”. Anderson is so full of stories that if he did lose his place in the script it really wouldn’t matter.Anderson demonstrates Read more ...
David Kettle
Deer Woman CanadaHub ★★★ You can feel the fury emanating from the stage in Tara Beagan’s incendiary solo play. Fury at the thousands of Indigenous Canadian women and girls who have gone missing in recent decades, abducted, raped and killed, and often never found (or even looked for). And fury, too, at well-meaning white liberals wringing their hands at such atrocities, yet ultimately doing nothing – like the majority of those in the audience, in fact.It’s a startling, extreme show, delivered in a spellbinding performance by Cherish Violet Blood that seems to dare Read more ...
David Kettle
Physical theatre company Theatre Re are virtually Fringe royalty these days, with a several-year history of fine shows under their belts, plus success internationally and at the London Mime Festival. And judging by their assured and richly resonant Birth this year, they’re just getting better and better – their productions more ambitious, more accomplished and with greater thematic depth.Following last year’s tearjerking take on dementia, The Nature of Forgetting, this year’s offering tackles – well, nothing less than human life itself. Birth follows three generations of women in the same Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nick Helm Pleasance Dome ****What a pleasure it is that Nick Helm has returned to the Fringe after six years away after appearing in television comedies Uncle and The Reluctant Landlord.That’s the straightforward reason he has been a stranger to Edinburgh, but doesn’t explain his 18 months away from standup, or why the show is called Phoenix From the Flames. He tells us it’s because he was finally getting to grips with the depression he has suffered from all his life (he’s now 38).That sounds like a bummer way to start a comedy show, but this is Nick Helm, so of course it starts Read more ...
David Kettle
Chekhov famously pronounced that if you’re going to bring a gun on stage, you’ve got to use it. Is the same true for a chainsaw? To discover the answer, just head along to Meghan Tyler’s wild, over-the-top, gruesome Crocodile Fever at the Traverse Theatre.It’s tempting, in fact, to draw parallels between Crocodile Fever and David Ireland’s brutal but hilarious Ulster American last year, with its rape gags and casual racism. Not that either of those elements appear in this year’s outrageous offering (is a shocking comedy becoming a Traverse Fringe tradition?), but Crocodile Fever shares Read more ...
David Kettle
Who’d have thought a play about a homophobic hate crime could be so much fun? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a little. But there are certainly lighter moments in La reprise, provocative Swiss-born director Milo Rau’s production with his International Institute of Political Murder at the International Festival, which investigates the torture and killing of 32-year-old Ihsane Jarfi in Liège in 2012.In fact, it’s Rau and his ensemble’s careful judging and pacing of mood that make La reprise so effective, and so memorable too. From its disarmingly jokey opening – complete with barbed Read more ...
David Kettle
You can’t question Javaad Alipoor’s ambition. Ancient Mesopotamian empires, geological layers of chicken bones, the half-life of polysterene cups, Thomas Gainsborough, Susan Sontag, Iranian political history, gold iPhones, mallwave – all that and plenty more gets crammed into the mere hour of his breathless Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran at the Traverse. And that’s even without mentioning the wordy narration, video projections, Instagram feeds, live video and multipanelled set he employs to get his ideas across.It all leaves you more than a bit bewildered. And indeed, if Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Josie Long The Stand ★★★★ It has been five years since Josie Long performed a full run at the Fringe, and in the meantime she has experienced a momentous event. She has had a daughter – whom she welcomed into the world, she tells us, with an impassioned speech about how it’s all gone to hell in a handcart, with a Tory Prime Minister and the climate-change emergency threatening to end the world before the wee one reaches adulthood.Of course she didn’t, but such are Long’s woke left-wing credentials that you could believe that she would.Her new show, Tender, is largely about pregnancy and Read more ...
David Kettle
Below the Blanket ★★★★ There’s a deep vein of melancholy running through Glasgow producing house Cryptic’s promenade installation Below the Blanket, which currently occupies several sites across Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden. Bringing together the work of a clutch of artists, and blurring boundaries between the sonic and the visual (a fertile hinterland that Cryptic has made very much its own), Below the Blanket is inspired by northern Scotland’s Flow Country, a spellbinding and little-known landscape stretching across Caithness and Sutherland. Not only a vital environment Read more ...
David Kettle
Enough ★★★★ Immaculately turned out in winning smiles, navy and nylon, cabin crew Jane and Toni dispense comforting reassurance and flirty glances to passengers at 30,000 feet. Down on the ground, though, they’re juggling kids, kitchen colour-schemes and semi-rapist boyfriends. And what’s that age-old rumble coming from deep in the ground?Stef Smith’s quietly epic new two-hander at the Traverse might begin as a chucklesome comedy about staying calm, controlled and sexy a mile high in the air. But it ends as a guttural howl of fury and despair – at ancient grievances re- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ciaran Dowd ***At the Fringe last year, Ciaran Dowd won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer for his show Don Rodolfo. Now he’s back with the follow-up, Padre Rodolfo. In this tall tale Don Rodolfo has stopped being the guy who puts “ass” into “assassin” and has found God. Rodolfo, using storytelling, mime and song, tells us how he has reached this point, how the Pope called him to Rome to attend a seminary. It was big change in his life, he says: “A lot more reading, a lot less rimming.”He was sorely tested by a nun who was sent to teach him the ways of the cloth. All this Read more ...