Theatre and Issue 611

Fiddler on the Roof

21 Aug 2008

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

Kids' stuff

21 Aug 2008

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

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…

Jim Rose Circus

Flat return for Fringe legend

21 Aug 2008

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

21 Aug 2008

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

21 Aug 2008

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

21 Aug 2008

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…

The Terrible Infants

Edible dark fairytales

21 Aug 2008

There are no happy endings in this collection of delectably dark fairytales: cannibal boy Tumb eats his mum, the unloved Thingummyboy evaporates and fibber Tilly grows a tail that lengthens with every tall tale she delivers. Writer Oliver Lansley’s…

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…

The Factory

Vivid Holocaust journey

21 Aug 2008

'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

21 Aug 2008

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…

The Tiger Lillies' 7 Deadly Sins

21 Aug 2008

You’re all going to Hell. That’s the message the Tiger Lillies are gleefully preaching with the help of a punk Mister Punch and his civil partner Jude. Gogol Bordello and Flogging Molly influence the Lillies’ distinctive sound, which flavours…

New World Order

Neo-conspiracy crimes, Shakespearean-style

21 Aug 2008

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

21 Aug 2008

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

21 Aug 2008

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

21 Aug 2008

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…

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…

Elvis Hates Me!

21 Aug 2008

Philip Stokes' play is set in a mental health ward where two patients believing they are Elvis Presley, are cared for by a disturbed nurse. The piece follows the nurse's fantasy about what she could have been and the world of celebrities. The cast not…

The House of the Grape

21 Aug 2008

'People just look at the star rating,' says Patrick when his French café gets a one-star review. 'They don't read in between the lines.' Like the restaurant, which he tries in vain to save from ruin, this play is unsalvageable. Lifeless and irritating…

Padamme, Padamme

21 Aug 2008

Monolingual Brits will inevitably miss some of Teatr Ecce Homo's captivating ensemble sequences while reading the (frequently frozen) surtitles, in this adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. Fluid movement work grants…

Loving Burns

21 Aug 2008

Two female performers weave songs from the Bard of Ayrshire into a pretty thin story which connects the many women in Burns' life. I'm not sure we really need another play about the errant but lovable rogue, but if we do, this isn't it, for the longing…

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…

Table 23

21 Aug 2008

A young man, who has turned his back on his family to write a novel, returns home after his sister's death to wind up the family restaurant. Contrasting with this apparently downbeat narrative is a performance style that incorporates physical comedy and…

In a Thousand Pieces

21 Aug 2008

No one should rush to the Paper Birds company in search of an incisive analysis of human trafficking. Despite drawing on verbatim material, In a Thousand Pieces tells you nothing you didn't already know about Eastern European women being sold into…

And the Devil May Drag You Under

21 Aug 2008

Diabolical cabaret in which the audience must vote each act into Heaven or Hell based on the purity of said act's soul. Host and hostess the Devil and Miss Mephisto are satanically delightful with their songs and skits, but some of the acts (which range…

Secret Agents

21 Aug 2008

This tale of a terrorist incident posits, refutes and amends aspects along the way in a risky attempt at meta-drama. When it works, the structure builds like a house of cards in a comment on the construction of truth, but plot holes and an obvious…

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…

The Shadow

21 Aug 2008

Enthusiastic acting is let down here by an over-written, confused and dizzyingly fast-paced script about a poet who loses his shadow. A barrage of contradictory metaphors dealing in the currency of light, dark, joy, greed, friend, foe and princesses…

Saving Tania's Privates

21 Aug 2008

This show should come with a warning. Not because of the references to lesbian sex and liberal attitudes to everything else - being open to that should go without saying. But because one woman (Tania Katan) exposes her survival of breast cancer (twice)…

Shafted

21 Aug 2008

Three men with motives for murder are trapped in a lift. As the lights flicker out, one succumbs to a macabre death in a straightforward thriller that even Stephen King would struggle to twist to life. Two valiant performances are dwarfed an almost…

The Censor

21 Aug 2008

Hands flicking towards each other's groins, two actors circle one another in the basement office of the film censorship board. Prudishness and sexuality are explored in Anthony Neilson's electrifying text. Unfortunately, the dynamics of the central…

Foreskins Lament

21 Aug 2008

This dodgy production of New Zealand playwright Greg McGee's landmark 1980 play is played out in the locker room of a local rugby club changing room. A couple of really appalling performances and some less than inspired direction derail things. Still at…

Histrionics

21 Aug 2008

With this rough-hewn but charming play, award-winning writer James Butler keeps the comedy flowing with men in drag, tuneless singing and tussles on the saloon floor. Blue smoke, a live lute and the damp air of the Caves transports us back to the 18th…

Strippers & Gentlemen

21 Aug 2008

This show does little to illuminate the dark truths of the stripper's lifestyle, but a lot to emulate their writhing dance moves and skimpy outfits. Good multimedia elements and promenade staging make the atmosphere genuinely exciting, but its ability…

Which to Burn?

21 Aug 2008

A one-woman show about loneliness, death and the Forth Rail Bridge might not sound like a winning combination, but Rachel Ogilvy brings the character to life through a series of remembered vignettes. The downbeat and often sad story of a woman trapped…

Another Side of the Mirror

21 Aug 2008

Lynn Ruth Miller returns to the Fringe to perform another chapter in her fascinating life. Now nearly 75 years old, she presents her memories to us with joy and candour. From anecdotes about her Romanian grandmother to her long battles with illness…

In Conflict

21 Aug 2008

A verbatim theatre piece featuring astute performances from a young cast, this series of interviews with US military personnel who have served in Iraq reflects everything from bitterness to a defiant kind of idealism. Director Douglas Wager adds some…

66a Church Road

21 Aug 2008

Sitting amid an array of suitcases as if he has been thrown out onto the street, Daniel Kitson creates a tragicomic riff on his old flat. At first the imaginative conceit successfully taps into the sentimentality people invest in their homes, but the…

Blue on Blue

21 Aug 2008

The subject of Afghan ambushes is pushed into the realm of cliché in this three-hander. Suffering after a possible friendly-fire incident, an American servicewoman shacks up with a Mujahedin rebel. An engaging performance from Arran Shanti fail to…

Scaramouche Jones

21 Aug 2008

Scaramouche Jones, the white-faced clown, has lived a century and wants to tell you the story of his life. Bring a cushion, because it's gonna be a loooong ride. An energetic performance from writer Justin Butcher doesn't hide the fact that this…

P.I.E

21 Aug 2008

Velvet and Hatcher are female private detectives. Together they crack bad puns and attempt to stage a full-scale murder mystery with just two actors. This is endearingly silly at best, drawing heavily on existing noir spoofs and lacking the originality…

Candide

21 Aug 2008

Despite a lively performance from Prentis Hancock as Voltaire, this one-man production fails to catch fire. The biting satire that makes the story so riveting simply doesn't emerge from behind the dialogue-heavy script, and the colourful characters…

The Bulging Seahorse and Other Grey Matters

21 Aug 2008

Root Experience explores the powerful dilemma of knowledge of impending death versus blissful ignorance. Using audience participation to shape certain scenes, the result is both amusing and thought-provoking. However, the plot lacks plausibility and…

Ella, Marilyn, Marlene and Me

21 Aug 2008

This one-woman show tells the story of a thirtysomething songstress who's dying to be the next Australian pop star. While her acting is patchy, Melissa Western's impersonations of Ella Fitzgerald and Marlene Dietrich are spot on, while her natural charm…

Hitler Alone

21 Aug 2008

The Führer rants and raves his most intimate concerns during his last hours in the bunker. While the script is often overladen with historical information, the central performance is at times incredibly compelling. Inlingua, 220 5119, until 24 Aug…