Edinburgh Festivals, International Festival

I Went To The House But Did Not Enter

edfest.tv - video

1 Sep 2008

Three iconic 20th century texts, the theatrical genius of Heiner Goebbels and the virtuosic vocal talents of the Hilliard Ensemble, specialists in both medieval and contemporary music

Deca Dance

edfest.tv - video

1 Sep 2008

Highly energized, daring and humorous dance from Israel's Batsheva Dance Company in a programme of works specially devised to showcase the breadth of choreographer Ohad Naharin's work

Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray

Effective storytelling makes for an adaptation with impact

29 Aug 2008

In the closing moments of Dorian Gray, a bright light shines out into the audience, temporarily blinding us. Something most people aren't used to, but those who spend their life in the spotlight are all too familiar with. It's this -- the trappings of…

I Went To The House But I Did Not Enter

Musical reflection of literary masters

29 Aug 2008

There has been no shortage of theatre that examines the disaffection and atomisation of modern life over the last century, but it’s less common to find a piece that selects four noted 20th century authors to explore the theme, then translates their work…

Ruhe

edfest.tv - video

27 Aug 2008

A recital of beautiful Schubert song is brutally interrupted by people who want to talk about their voluntary enlistment in the SS.

Eye to the future at the end of the line for Edinburgh Festival 2008

Alan Bissett's festival blog

27 Aug 2008

Ah, the end of the Fringe. Goodbye rain. Goodbye bright-eyed young hopefuls thrusting flyers. Goodbye posh accents. How was it for you? Depending on who you talk to, plays this year have been too bleak/political/teenage. Given the gloomy political…

Class Enemy

edfest.tv - video

26 Aug 2008

In a run-down schoolroom a group of foul-mouthed high school students conduct their own lessons as they await teachers who never arrive.

Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray

edfest.tv - video

26 Aug 2008

New Adventures, Sadlers Wells and the Edinburgh International Festival present Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray freely adapted from Oscar Wilde's masterpiece.

Devil's Ship

Intriguing, atmospheric Iranian chiller

26 Aug 2008

This Iranian story, with a lurking subtext of supernatural horror, performed in Farsi with English subtitles by Bazi Theatre Company, features a group of women in a claustrophobic emotional vacuum. While the women rely on custom to get them through the…

365

Magical reflection on children in care

26 Aug 2008

The idea of a play about children in care might not immediately strike you as the an entertaining festival night out, but overcome your prejudices. Vicky Featherstone’s production of David Harrower’s script for the NTS touches upon the issues that…

Class enemy

Heavy-handed adaptation

21 Aug 2008

Haris Pasovic’s production of Class Enemy for Bosnian company East West retains the central theme of Nigel Williams’ 1978 play - the desperate need for nurturing among young people neglected by an under-funded education system - to powerful effect. Yet…

365 - One Night to Learn a Lifetime

Shock tactics

21 Aug 2008

With 365, a series of fragmented narratives about children leaving care, Vicky Featherstone’s National Theatre of Scotland cements its commitment to telling stories of the people. Kirstin Innes meets the cast, writer and director. Lunchtime, and…

Budapest Festival Orchestra

Folk and gypsy influence evident in programme of two concerts

21 Aug 2008

Starting off with a programme inspired by gypsy music and Hungarian folk melodies, the Budapest Festival Orchestra give two full orchestral concerts in the last week of the Festival plus two presented by some of their soloists. Featuring some rather…

Devil's Ship

21 Aug 2008

Renowned Iranian actor-director Attila Pesyani, founder of the Bazi Theatre Company, brings his haunting new play to the EIF for its European premier following a successful run at Tehran’s Fadjir International Theatre Festival. Performed in Farsi with…

Five questions: Jill Gascoine

21 Aug 2008

Currently enjoying a successful run playing the suicidal mother of four estranged daughters in Sister Cities at the Gilded Balloon, star of The Gentle Touch and CATS Eyes Jill Gascoine turns her talents to our Q&A 4 shows you’re looking forward to…

I Went To The House But Did Not Enter

First person peculiar

21 Aug 2008

Edinburgh favourite Heiner Goebbels returns to the Festival with the world premier of his collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble, I Went to the House but Did Not Enter. Mark Fisher catches up with him The scene is Lausanne, Switzerland where a…

Jerusalem Quartet

Globally renowned Israeli foursome make their EIF debut

21 Aug 2008

Making its Edinburgh International Festival debut, the Jerusalem Quartet is the final string quartet to appear at this year’s impressive Queen’s Hall series. Performing in the wake of the Ysaÿe, Belcea and Pavel Haas quartets, the quartet is, says EIF…

Regal king size

21 Aug 2008

Karol Szymanowski considered himself an outsider which is why he identified with Sicily’s King Roger II and why his opera has become a gay favourite, finds Carol Main The Edinburgh International Festival’s staged opera programme is swinging from one…

4.48 Psychosis

Painful journey into despair

16 Aug 2008

Having seen Grzegorz Jarzyna's mesmerising production of this Sarah Kane play on the intimate stage of TR Warszawa in Poland, I was concerned the playwright's sad mediation on suicide would lose its intensity on the bigger stage of the King's. I needn't…

Looking at Tazieh

Fascinating filmed version of millennium-old Persian drama

16 Aug 2008

This video installation by Abbas Kiarostami renders into real emotion a filmed version of Tazieh a millennium-old form of Persian drama enacted annually to commemorate and grieve the loss of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammed. But the felt…

Jidariyya

Palestinian end game

15 Aug 2008

There's a sad irony that a play about mortality should open in Edinburgh only days after the death of its author. Mahmoud Darwish was a major Palestinian poet and his Jidariyya was a response to a life-threatening heart attack a decade ago. It was…

5 Questions - Ruth Janssen

14 Aug 2008

As Scottish Dance Theatre lights up the Fringe with its superb double-bill of dynamic contemporary works, dancer Ruth Janssen faces the music.

Amir Nizar Zuabi - Jidariyya

Poetry in motion

14 Aug 2008

Perhaps the greatest psychological pain humans can feel occurs when they are denied language. The sense of frustration that builds from a voice unheard, marginalised or rendered irrelevant by the listener can be overwhelming. This is as true of the…

Class Enemy

A different class

14 Aug 2008

When Nigel Williams’ Class Enemy made its debut at London’s Royal Court in 1978, hip hop was still a phenomenon of the American underground. It would never have occurred to a director to incorporate it into this portrayal of a bunch of teenagers in a…

Mortal Engine

14 Aug 2008

Using cutting-edge technology, Australia’s Chunky Move dance company explores human interaction and mortality. Performed on a steeply raked stage, the show features patterns of music and sound triggered by the dancers’ movement and re-routed back to the…

Prokofiev - The Symphonies

Russian around with the tireless Valery Gergiev

14 Aug 2008

In one of the most exciting orchestral weekends hosted by the Usher Hall, the London Symphony Orchestra appears with its principal conductor, Valery Gergiev, performing all of Prokofiev’s seven symphonies plus the two violin concertos with soloist…

Roby Lakatos

14 Aug 2008

Labelled ‘the devil’s fiddler’, Hungarian gypsy violinist Roby Lakatos has to be heard to be believed. With an illustrious musical ancestry descending from the king of gypsy violinists, Lakatos is a classically trained virtuoso, but is famed for the way…

Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca

Pain and passion on the dancefloor

14 Aug 2008

Noche Flamenca is less a company and more of a community. Founded in Madrid in 1993, by artistic director Martin Santangelo and his Flamenco dancing wife, Soledad Barrio, the group is far more concerned with expressing its artistry than grabbing the…

Steve Reich Evening

Music and dance pioneers in perfect harmony

14 Aug 2008

She's one of the most prominent names in European contemporary dance, he's a giant of American minimalist music. Together, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Steve Reich make quite a pair - although their partnership is a result of admiration, rather than…

The Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Revolutionnaire Et Romantique

Good grief as Gardiner tackles Brahms

14 Aug 2008

After an absence of almost ten years, authentic performance pioneer John Eliot Gardiner returns to the Edinburgh Festival with his Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique. Performing Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem and Begräbnisgesang…

Transgression

Taking it to extremes

14 Aug 2008

Transgression is a breathtaking showcase of urban sports skills, taking in BMXing, skateboarding, inline skating, freerunning, even extreme unicycling. Performed on one of the Fringe's most unique venues - a full skate park and ramps surrounded by a…

Dybbuk

Jewish ghost story fails to haunt

11 Aug 2008

The idea to combine two different treatments of the Jewish myth of the dybbuk is inspired. In sandwiching together the play by Szymon Anski, a traditional drama about a woman possessed by the spirit of her dead lover, and a modern story by Hanna Krall…

The Tell-Tale Heart

11 Aug 2008

There a pretty solid precedent for Poe's celebrated story of dark grotesquery adapted to theatre in the shape of Steven Berkoff's version a generation ago. But in this piece, there's less of the ghastly, uncomfortable humour that so marked out the…

Cultural feast and nutritional famine at Edinburgh Festival

Steve Cramer's festival blog

8 Aug 2008

I’m pining for a vegetable. At the moment, it doesn’t feel as though I’ll be eating one until September. At the best of times reviewers have an irregular diet, since at most people’s dinner time we’re either in shows or on the way to them. But at the…

Festival News In Brief

7 Aug 2008

The Performing Rights Soci ety (PRS) has announced plans to give more new talent the chance to perform in front of a Fringe audience on Sunday 10 August at this year?s Fringe Sunday festivities. A small group of musical types from the worlds of rock…

Gustavo Dudamel

7 Aug 2008

With the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, he took the Edinburgh Festival and the London Proms by storm last year. Now, the charismatic 27-year-old conductor Gustavo Dudamel returns to Edinburgh with the Gothenburg Symphony. When he was…

Messiaen 100

Centenary swansong from the moreish birdman

7 Aug 2008

Even over half way through the 100th anniversary year of the birth of Olivier Messiaen – numerous concerts, recordings and broadcasts of his music at every turn – the urge is still to hear more, not less. Regarding himself as much an ornithologist as a…

Nina Ananiashvili

7 Aug 2008

Having just turned 45, the days in which Nina Ananiashvili can perform moves like this must surely be numbered. So now’s the time to catch one of the finest prima ballerinas of her generation. A dancer with the Bolshoi for many years, Ananiashvili now…

Song and Civilization

Chants will be a fine thing

7 Aug 2008

If a singing nun conjures up images of The Sound of Music or Sister Act, then it’s time to get real and listen to the exquisite beauty of Sister Marie Keyrouz. Appearing as part of the EIF’s fascinating Song and Civilization series, the Lebanese-born…

Edinburgh International Festival 2008

edfest.tv - video

5 Aug 2008

International Festival Director, Jonathan Mills, explains the background to EIF 08 and invites you to embark upon an exciting and often confronting journey…

Edinburgh Festivals Cavalcade

Our toon cavalcade

31 Jul 2008

The warning signs have been building for weeks: large parties of Italian teenagers in rucksacks occupying whole stretches of pavement, posters of vaguely-familiar looking comedians obscuring bus shelters and funny dressed people eating fire on the Royal…

Early mourning - 4.48 Psychosis

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

Nine years ago, uncompromising playwright Sarah Kane ended her own life. In an old Warsaw variety theatre, Mark Fisher is shaken by a mesmerising staging of her final work.

Foe play - Class Enemy

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

In times of both war and peace, Haris Pasovic has created crucial theatre. Malcolm Jack speaks to him about taking a story set in 1970s Brixton and plunging it into contemporary Sarajevo.

Video nation - Looking at Tazieh

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

Aiming to debunk some of the cruder myths of Iran and its people, acclaimed director Abbas Kiarostami brings us a filmed account of an ancient drama. Miles Fielder talks to him about universal themes.

Wilde boys - Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

Matthew Bourne is taking his biggest risk yet by revamping The Picture of Dorian Gray. Kelly Apter talks to him about sensuality, satire and the death of Heath Ledger.

Death becomes them - The Two Widows

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

Jane Irwin and Kate Valentine are at very different stages in their operatic careers. But Carol Main finds them both in exuberant mood ahead of Scottish Opera’s take on Smetana’s 19th century comedy.

The IT crowd - Mortal Engine

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

An enormous technological feat and huge physical challenge, Chunky Move’s new show has been universally acclaimed. Kelly Apter hears how choreographer Gideon Obarzanek’s dream came vividly to life. Bumps, bruises and bunions. It’s all in a day’s work…

Messiaen 100

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

Celebrating a centenary with intimate recitals and orchestral drama. As a composer he was the epitome of innovation; as a musician he could move a room to silent awe. That the EIF is choosing to celebrate the centenary of Olivier Messiaen as part of its…

The Tell-Tale Heart

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

Tension-filled hour of Edgar Allan Poe’s psychological chiller. Barrie Kosky made his mark last year with the vulgar extravagance of Poppea, a show that blended Monteverdi opera with the songs of Cole Porter. Now he’s back with an altogether more…

I Went to the House But Did Not Enter

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

A collage-based approach to theatre from maverick creator. Heiner Goebbels’ latest work may be in the Edinburgh International Festival’s drama programme, but the scope of this maverick composer and theatre maker is far more expansive. In 2001…