Theatre, Issue 611

Fiddler on the Roof

This new touring production of the much-loved Jerry Brock musical stars Joe McCann as Tevye, dairyman and father to five headstrong daughters in Czarist Russia, who becomes torn between Jewish tradition and the actions of his family against a backdrop…

Regal king size

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…

Once And For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen

Kids' stuff

OK, so enough with the sweet cheeky kids already. The audience pretty much obeyed the injunction in the title of this new piece from Belgium's Ontroerend Goed at the Traverse and came away amused, if not exactly enlightened. The piece essentially…

Simon Callow - A Festival Dickens

A rich performance of moving, entertaining tales

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…

Jim Rose Circus

Flat return for Fringe legend

The return of the Jim Rose Circus to the Fringe has been heralded with all the fanfare of a second coming - a strange deification, considering the show is set in Hell. Sadly, the carnivalesque sideshow atmosphere of yore has been obliterated in…

Greenstick Boy

Hearts and bones broken

In her one-woman show about falling in love with a heroin addict, Maggie Cronin of Doctors fame entertains her audience with winning, bittersweet humour. Entitled Greenstick Boy after a 'greenstick fracture', a slight and sometimes hidden injury to a…

Fawn

A muddled monologue

While perhaps the simplest form of theatre to stage, the monologue is not the easiest to pull off successfully. Fawn, a fantastical narrative about a girl transported from a forest into a netherworld of alternative realities, never quite rises to the…

Joan Rivers - Work in progress by a life in progress

New York's comedy diva explores the ageing process - again

It has fallen to Joan Rivers, the world's best-known female comic, to provide some much needed glamour at this year's Fringe. Clad in a black pantsuit and hot pink shawl, the crude magnetism of her celebrity status keeps the packed house fixed on her…

Etcetera

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

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…

The Factory

Vivid Holocaust journey

'They came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.' Attributed to Martin Niemöller, this sentiment comes to mind during Badac Theatre's disturbing and compelling reconstruction of the death journey of so many of Hitler's final…

Lough/Rain

Quietly tragic relationship drama

This piece, co-authored by Declan Feenan and Clara Brennan, opens on an early morning scene involving a couple (Jot Davies and Kate Donmall) living in a rural Northern Irish community, which segues into a day sometime later, when the male half of the…

New World Order

Neo-conspiracy crimes, Shakespearean-style

Fringe acclaimed over the last two years for Love Labours Won, West Yorkshire writer, director and performer Ryan JW Smith returns with a much more bitter pill. Smith loves Shakespeare. His is the cut'n'paste approach to the bard; his conceit here is…

Another Kind of Silence

Enviromentalist writer brought to compelling life

If the environmental movement in the US has a progenitor and figurehead it is marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson. Her writing and research in the late 1950s/early 1960s brought attention to the then unfashionable issue of conservation…

The Lie-in, the Itch and the Whore's Robe

Ikea-style physical theatre

This comment on the consumerist ideology that holds us all together like a gargantuan supermarket carrier bag, imparts the notion of an overly ordered life with a fairly diverting blend of dance and rhyme. As a shrieking, nagging housewife coerces her…

The Magic Tree

No magic here

From the programme notes, Ursula Rani Sarma's play sounds a dark, yet passionate love story - which just goes to show how misleading a synopsis can be. The Magic Tree explores themes of murder and gang rape and how these experiences destroy lives…