Issue 610

A shared experience

Age is not a factor for the Armed Forces. It is shared experience that counts and each member of the forces has his or her own experiences to draw upon and assist others. Every year the Royal Regiment of Scotland hosts an activity weekend for cadets…

Barry & Stuart: Part-time Warlocks

Part-time warlocks, full-time fun

It's hard to imagine Paul Daniels onstage with a joint that transforms into a gold chain, and there's no danger you'd have caught him magically turning a porn mag into a map of Iraq. Describing themselves as the 'anti-Paul Daniels of magic', these…

Chuck Palahniuk - Snuff love

Chuck Palahniuk tells such stark tales that people faint at his readings. Doug Johnstone crosses his legs, girds his loins and chats to the guru of gore

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

A childhood state of imaginative possibility

Over six pieces comprising kinetic sculpture, projections, visceral jokes, total immersion sensory works, whole room architectural installations and, with ‘Opera for a Small Room’ (pictured), an awe-inspiringly perfect sound sculpture, Cardiff and Bures…

Louis CK

Domestic policy

Championed by Ricky Gervais, loved by late-night US TV and censored by his wife, Louis CK is preparing to launch his brand of outrageous confessional comedy on the UK. Claire Prentice finds out just how far he's prepared to go. Louis CK is driving…

Russell Howard

Beat surrender

Russell Howard can't resist a spot of testicular tomfoolery but, he tells Jay Richardson, his new act is less Buster Gonad than Jack Kerouac With his infectious, wide-eyed optimism currently offering a counterbalance to Frankie Boyle's unflinching…

Simon Munnery - Festival veteran

Simon Munnery shares his lessons learned from 21 years on the Fringe

Take 5: Plays with a gruesome body count

Topping the morbidity league with plane upon planeful of passengers heading to a nasty end, Charlie Victor Romeo takes transcripts from black box recorders and re-enacts those scary final minutes of sky-high tension. Not every passenger dies, but most…

The Vanishing Point

Awe inspiring spectacle on stilts

The Vanishing Point is sheer delight. The stilt walkers, communicating to each other through some sort of primeval whale song, trace a pattern of evolution from dinosaur-like creatures and sexually charged tribal people to, briefly, dead-eyed office…

Lisa Appignanesi - Express yourself

Kate Gould finds Lisa Appignanesi on good form as she discusses the history of health and the future of censorship

Office Party

Tasteless delights

Seldom were ham and cheese so well combined in a sandwich as in Cal McCrystal’s interactive version of that familiar titular institution, the office party. The show may be disrupted here and there by its structure, but this seems to do nothing to dampen…

Gavin Francis

Trekking round the back door of Europe

Edinburgh-based GP-turned-adventurer and travel writer Gavin Francis’ next book – charting an epic motorcycle schlep from Orkney to Sydney – will finish on an ironic endnote. Having survived the mean streets of Beirut and New Delhi on its journey, his…

John Pinette

Say yeah yeah to big bad John

Since getting Jerry and co locked up in the grand finale of Seinfeld, John Pinette has spent the last decade making a name for himself on Broadway and in Hollywood. Having worked with the likes of Sinatra, Arnie and Travolta, he may not need the Fringe…

Pajama Men

Fantastic yet familiar physical horseplay

The Fringe traditionally gets its unfair share of headlines for being a hotbed of nudity and a feast of skin-baring. But two guys in their jimmy-jams before the watershed? What gives? The massively innovative North American double act of Shenoah Allen…

Yasser

An original take on the Middle East conflict

The concept of national identity becomes ever more fragile in the absence of a nation state. A people bereft of the glue that binds modern communities together – whether real or imagined – risk having their identity defined by others, moulded by…

5 Questions - Krishma Bachoo

5 words to describe the Obscene vs Volume experience? Friendly, anything goes, genre-less, bass-fuelled, mayhem. 4 things you love about the DJs/acts on the bill? Everyone is playing for free for Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre’s & Myeloma UK. MC…

We All Fall Down

Playing with the Plague

Who'd have thought the Black Death could be so much fun? Or that a tale with such a strong moral heart could be so full of laughs and silliness? The story of two 17th century villages both blighted with the plague, the show explores the selfish and…

Festival of Politics

Meanwhile, over at the Scottish Parliament... the Festival of Politics is back for a fourth year and making visiting Fringe slebs really work for their money, as Simon Callow leads a discussion on changing rights for LGBT communities in the UK, and…

Messin’ Around

One of the London Jazz Café’s longest running nights (12 years and counting) takes a trip north for the Festival. DJ Adrian Gibson will be mixing up ‘the good stuff’ – jazz, funk, Latin and soul – as showcased on over 70 compilation albums he’s produced…

Andrew Mueller - I Wouldn’t Start From Here

A few weeks after 9/11, Andrew Mueller – rock journalist, travel writer and self-ascribed hack – browsed the list of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organisations released by the US State Department and wondered what it might be like to be one of those…

Ben Kingsley - The Wackness

Seeing Gandhi with crazy hair is even weirder than watching 64-year-old Sir Ben Kingsley snog 22-year-old Mary Kate Olsen. But fear not, the knighted actor hasn’t had some innovative hair treatment to unpolish his famously shiny snooker ball, he’s…

Amir Nizar Zuabi - Jidariyya

Poetry in motion

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…

Esther B Robinson - A Walk Into the Sea

In July 1966, Esther B Robinson’s uncle Danny Williams drove home to Massachusetts, with a shaving kit full of drugs, and took his own life. Thirty-four years later, Esther’s grandmother Nadia came to visit her granddaughter’s workplace at the Warhol…