Edinburgh
David Kettle
The Ode Islands, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★ I might be going out on a limb here, but you’re unlikely to encounter anything quite like The Ode Islands elsewhere on the Fringe – perhaps anywhere, to be honest. That’s both in terms of form and content. Let’s get the first of those out of the way: Irish-born, Hastings-based solo performer Ornagh (yes, she’s single-named) dances, acts and lip-synchs sandwiched between two screens, interacting with intricate CGI both as a backdrop of psychedelic landscapes and in the foreground as monsters, demons and more. The effect isn’t always 100% faultless, Read more ...
David Kettle
Ordinary Decent Criminal, Summerhall ★★★★★ Frankie learnt a thing or two about the police and how they work from his years as an activist. Fighting for crucial political causes, however, never seemed at odds with a sideline in drug-dealing – which, when the authorities got wind that the chocolate bars he was importing from Spain weren’t exactly Cadbury’s, earned him a few years inside. Once banged up, however, Frankie finds himself immersed in prison feuds, struggles for power, conflicts and unexpected connections.Ed Edwards’s vivid, vibrant solo play fits its performer – comedy legend, Read more ...
David Kettle
Kinder, Underbelly, Cowgate ★★★ Drag artist Goody Prostate (yes, I know) receives a call from a local library. Garbed in lederhosen and sporting a preposterous German accent, she was expecting a brutal, no-prisoners-taking drag roast battle. Instead, she finds that she’s actually been booked to read to a bunch of kids.Okay, the starting point for Melbourne-based actor/writer Ryan Stewart’s solo show might not be the Fringe’s most convincing, but it nonetheless offers up plenty of opportunities for a dissection of current moral panics, and of the rights and wrongs of introducing children Read more ...
David Kettle
The Horse of Jenin, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★ Alaa Shehada bounds onto the stage, all muscular energy and swaggering self-confidence, for what’s effectively a cross between stand-up and solo theatre. Is it wrong to joke about Palestine? Definitely not, the larger-than-life, matey Shehada clearly thinks, finding plenty that’s funny, or certainly much that’s bleakly ironic, in his native city of Jenin in the West Bank, its cast of flawed, colourful characters, and its strange and awkward ways of life. With the threatening spectre of Israeli occupation constantly in the background.In many ways, Read more ...
David Kettle
The Fit Prince (who gets switched on the square in the frosty castle the night before (insert public holiday here)), Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★They’ve created an affectionate but merciless send-up of Princess Di; they’ve lampooned Gwyneth Paltrow, her lifestyle brand Goop and her (ahem) unfortunate skiing collision; and they’ve even got their claws into the horror show that was the movie version of Cats. Awkward Productions – aka real-life couple Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – have a well-rehearsed arsenal of tried-and-tested techniques for skewering those who deserve it (or, in many cases, don Read more ...
David Kettle
With the sheer density of theatrical creations jostling for attention across Edinburgh’s festivals, there’s no shortage of arresting stagings, innovative visuals and powerful, memorable design. (Just take Cena Brasil Internacional’s shocking Tom at the Farm as one particularly epic, raw example.)The sheer scale of the theatrical ambition on display in Works and Days from Antwerp theatre collective FC Bergman, however, might just make your jaw drop again and again. But it’s a fitting theatrical response to a particularly epic subject: nothing less than the history of civilisation itself, told Read more ...
David Kettle
The Beautiful Future is Coming, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★Flora Wilson Brown’s epoch-straddling, climate change-themed six-hander had a run at the Bristol Old Vic before transferring to the Traverse Theatre for its Fringe residency. It shows: this is a rich, assured production, deeply bedded in, and as fluid in its performances as it is clear-headed (sometimes harrowingly so) in its themes.And those themes are pretty weighty ones. In 1850s New York, hobbyist scientist (as she’s patronisingly called) Eunice Foote has made a shocking discovery about carbon dioxide, air and heat, but expresses her Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Say what you like about this year’s slimmer-than-usual Edinburgh International Festival, but when it has hit the spot, it has done so triumphantly. Nowhere has that so far been truer than in the piano playing, as this pair of concerts demonstrated. In the Queen’s Hall on Tuesday morning, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy joined forces in a programme of four-handed piano (★★★★★), sometimes on one keyboard and sometimes on two, that climaxed in a transcendent, dazzling, occasionally stupefying performance of Messiaen’s visionary Visions de l’Amen. From the very opening, Kolesnikov played Read more ...
Simon Thompson
NYO2 is a group of dazzlingly talented (and terrifyingly young-looking) 14-17 year olds from the USA, one of Carnegie Hall’s three national youth ensembles, and with a focus on supporting young musicians from communities that are under-represented in the arts. This Edinburgh International Festival concert marked their European debut, and they’re doing a miniature residency in Edinburgh that, in another concert, involves them playing alongside some talented young Scots. Whatever their age, they can certainly play. Perhaps the only concession to their inexperience came from conductor Read more ...
David Kettle
Lost Lear, Traverse Theatre ★★★★A rehearsal room; a tense preparation session for a production of King Lear, provocatively gender-swapped; a troublesome diva in the title role; and a near-silent understudy barely able to contribute.Dan Colley’s compelling ensemble piece has a big twist early on, then several further shifts in emphasis and direction that keep the audience guessing throughout, and which also force a reappraisal of everything you’ve just seen. But his central conceit offers apparently endless – and often contradictory – insights. Iconic Irish actor Joy is in a care home, where Read more ...
David Kettle
You could distinctly hear the murmurs of recognition from the Edinburgh audience – responding to knowing mentions of the city’s Leith and Morningside areas, the building of Royal Bank of Scotland’s immense Gogarburn HQ, the institution’s towering greed and ambition – during James Graham’s epic new history of RBS, its single-minded CEO Fred Goodwin and the 2008 financial crisis that was unveiled at the Edinburgh International Festival.There are clearly still-fresh memories, unresolved issues, unhealed wounds about Goodwin’s decade in charge that transformed RBS into the biggest bank in the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rhys Darby, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Rhys Darby, the New Zealand actor and comic best known as Murray Hewitt in Flight of the Conchords, is back at the Fringe after nearly a decade away with The Legend Returns.It’s an elaborate tale about the march of AI – “Fuck, that horse has bolted” – which, true to form, he tells with great warmth. There’s a mix of physical comedy, daft voices and impressions (from helicopters to electric cars) and silly storytelling, with a generous flow of gags – verbal, aural and physical – thrown in.The hour takes us on a journey involving tech bros, domestic Read more ...