Edinburgh Festivals, Miles Fielder

All the world’s a stage

15 Sep 2008

Merchant City Festival (25-28 Sep) www.merchantcityfestival.com Located in the heart of old Glasgow, this event locates a programme of film, theatre, comedy, visual arts, street theatre, live music, food and fashion within an area of real…

About Benson & Hill

21 Aug 2008

This likeable double act play tag, so you get Geordie comic Luke Benson's audience-based improvisations and clever wordplay followed by his Leicestershire counterpart Martin Hill's observations about everyday life laced with surreal…

Etcetera

Weird and wonderful - but what's it all about?

21 Aug 2008

No strings attached (well, not many) in this experimental piece of puppet theatre from avant-garde Polish company K3. Three puppeteers, dressed from neck to ankle in black, animate a series of string-free two-foot tall magnolia-coloured cloth mannequins…

Simon Callow - A Festival Dickens

A rich performance of moving, entertaining tales

21 Aug 2008

Having taken his celebrated one-man show The Mystery of Charles Dickens around the world, British thesp Simon Callow is no stranger to the Victorian writer and philanthropist. Here, Callow performs his second solo Dickens show under the sure-handed…

The Self-Murder

21 Aug 2008

This physical theatre show from Russian company Stop! See! Sense! Russia! is a well-intentioned attempt to address the problem of suicide among the nation's youth. The show, which employs a daily revolving cast and multimedia, dramatises an encounter…

Vladimir McTavish

21 Aug 2008

In addition to generating plenty of laughs, the oddly monikered Glasgow-born comedian's new list-based show makes for a very serviceable and satirical potted history of Scotland. By nature of being a top 50 (Greatest Scots Ever!), McTavish's list is far…

AL Kennedy

14 Aug 2008

Those familiar with Kennedy's profound award-winning fiction will be surprised by her style of stand-up. Affable, enthusiastic and a little amateurish, Kennedy's routines revolve around commonplace subjects ranging from a visit to the dentist to pulling…

Arnold Brown

14 Aug 2008

Quite why this veteran comic needs a warm-up act is anyone's guess. Irish stand-up Ian Macpherson has got a perfectly fine line of patter, but Brown is such a consummate and idiosyncratic comedian you want a full hour of him. Nevertheless, the impish…

Boys of the Empire

High-camp boy’s own comedy deserves six of the best

14 Aug 2008

This self-consciously silly, satirical stab at the boy’s own adventure wants to be Just William with a nod towards The History Boys by way of Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns. Set between an English boarding school in the late 1930s, and the newly re-named…

Frank Satan In Person

Beguiling and bawdy drinking songs

14 Aug 2008

If you dig Tom Waits, Dean Martin and Hank Williams, then Frank Satan (pronounced ‘Say-tan’) is your man. The long-time alter ego of the Cameo Cinema’s general manager Ian Hoey is back after a lengthy break to regale audiences with a bawdy combo of…

George Orwell's Coming Up For Air

Funny, tragic stage adaptation of little-known text

14 Aug 2008

What swiftly becomes apparent about this adroit adaptation of George Orwell’s lesser-known 1939 novel is how powerfully it resonates today. Written on the eve of World War II, while the author was in Morocco recovering from an injury sustained fighting…

Jimeoin

Refining a lost art of the commonplace

14 Aug 2008

Less is definitely more with this Irish comic. Although he's playing to a packed house, Jimeoin eschews the customary mic-stand and bellowing delivery and instead wears a discreet ear-piece, talks softly, mumbles quite a bit and relies on facial…

Lies Have Been Told: An Evening with Robert Maxwell

Reviled figure rebuffs his critics

14 Aug 2008

The tremendous performance by Phillip York in this one-man show about Robert Maxwell is so impressive you’re likely to find yourself admiring, and even feeling sorry for the once reviled late media mogul. But as towering a performance and uncannily…

Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved

Bold, original show from sickeningly talented young performer

14 Aug 2008

Stefan Golaszewski’s a sickeningly talented young man. Squished into a sweaty attic in the Pleasance and armed with nothing more than a handful of props and some banging techo music, the young London lad is bowling over audiences with his first solo…

Nick Doody

Merging satire with daftness

7 Aug 2008

A technical hitch during the previous show delays the returning Fringe comedian's show by 15 minutes, but soon the relatively substantial crowd sits in the dark watching Nick Doody's entree, a stereo slideshow of global news horror stories intercut with…

George Orwell's Coming Up for Air

Adaptation of overlooked novel by born again Fringe virgin

31 Jul 2008

On the eve of its 70th anniversary, one of George Orwell’s lesser-known novels has been adapted as a one-hour monologue to be performed by veteran Fringe actor and stand-up comedian Hal Cruttenden. Set in England in 1938, Coming Up For Air dramatises…

Surviving Spike

The tortured genius behind the inspired comic lunacy

31 Jul 2008

Surviving Spike promises to reveal the ‘tormented character that hid behind the public facade’. Audiences could be forgiven for assuming the blurb refers to the show’s star, Michael Barrymore, whose career was all but destroyed by revelations of the…

The Wilders

Honky-tonk storytelling with added goatee

31 Jul 2008

As Ike Sheldon, the Missouri-born lead singer and guitarist of the country four-piece The Wilders, likes to say, ‘you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.’ Sheldon’s got the hillbilly sound in him. He can’t…

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.

Before The Rains

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Santosh Sivan, US/India) 98min Set against the backdrop of the decline of the British empire and growth of the nationalist movement in southern India in 1937, this tale of forbidden love between an English spice merchant (Linus Roache) and a local…

Death Defying Acts

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Gillian Armstrong, UK, Australia) 97min It’s 1926, and the world tour of escape artist Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) brings him to Edinburgh. There he’s charmed by local con-artist Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who poses as a psychic to put…

Tiramisu

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Paula van der Oest, Netherlands) 90min Abandoned by her theatre director husband for a younger woman, middle-aged actress and retail therapy junkie Anne seems unconcerned by the impending loss of the Amsterdam houseboat she and her long-suffering…

The Wackness

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Jonathan Levine, USA) 110min Jonathan Levine’s follow-up to his superior teen horror flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is just as assured a film, although this wigged-out high school movie is greatly enriched by being a far more personal project.

The Edge of Love - Sharman Macdonald interview

Edinburgh International Film Festival

5 Jun 2008

At the programme launch of the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival artistic director Hannah McGill thanked the makers of The Edge of Love for providing her with the perfect opening night film. What McGill no doubt meant by this was that The Edge…

Breach

Chris Cooper interview

23 Aug 2007

Chris Cooper’s got pedigree. The 56-year-old American actor began his impressive big screen career with the great independent filmmaker John Sayles, making four films with him, including Cooper’s 1987 debut, the miner’s union drama Matewan, and the…