Theatre, Issue 686
81 articles
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Alternative Fringe hubs: The Forest Cafe
17 Aug 2011
Edinburgh's soon-to-be dearly-departed hippy haven
Name: The Forest Café Occupation: Leader of the resistance, home of Edinburgh’s true creative spirit. Resembles: A glorious, shambolic cluster of plants, art, rugs, hippies and graffiti, spread across several rooms. What’s on there, then?
You Once Said Yes
12 Aug 2011
Exhilarating interactive experience
This one-on-one interactive show is initially – and purposefully – disconcerting, but it swiftly becomes utterly thrilling, mysterious, funny and finally really quite sweet. It begins at Underbelly Cowgate, where single audience members are equipped for…
James Galea: I Hate Rabbits
12 Aug 2011
High on production values, low on magic
Before the titular magician arrives on stage, there are a few mockumentary video clips of traditional rabbit-loving magicians explaining how much they hate James Galea for insulting their profession. This is followed by a showreel of his greatest…
The Golden Dragon
12 Aug 2011
Global stories to take away
Roland Schimmelpfennig’s 2009 play, a bit hit in Germany, is a gift for a director. His characters are blank canvases with names such as ‘The Young Woman’ and ‘The Man Over 60’. Much of their dialogue is written in the third person, stage directions…
3D Hamlet: A Lost Generation
12 Aug 2011
Strong acting secures the Bard a place in the 21st century
Were this show set in a different venue, with decent sight lines, a proper projection screen and space bigger than a postage stamp for the actors to perform on, it would be a shoe-in for five stars. Abridged, but retaining all the salient points and key…
King of Scotland
12 Aug 2011
Strong presentation of Iain Heggie’s second best monologue
It’s 11 years since the premiere of Iain Heggie’s free adaptation of Gogol’s satire Diary of a Madman. Jonathan Watson, star of TV football sketch show Only an Excuse?, follows Brian Pettifer and the late Gerard Kelly in tackling the role of Tommy…
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
12 Aug 2011
Depressing tale of decay of the upper classes in Russia
Adaptation of one of the later plays of the influential playwright, focussing on the decay of the upper classes in Russia. Depressing tale where everyone is perpetually dissatisfied, most characters are selfish or unrealistically idealistic and all the…
Interview: Stephen Earnhart - Director of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
11 Aug 2011
Haruki Murakami adaptation centrepiece of Edinburgh International Festival
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Stephen Earnhart’s stage adaptation of a novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, epitomises the International Festival’s desire to explore connections between East and West, writes Mark Brown
Audience
11 Aug 2011
Ontroerend Goed slip out of the major league with cynical show
Audience opens with an informal talk from cast member Maria, about what it means to be in an audience. You’re not really supposed to talk; you need to clap at the end. We chuckle appreciatively. The joke is that of course we know this. We’re not just…
Turandot
11 Aug 2011
A radical completion of Puccini's unfinished opera
The familiar tune of Nessun Dorma, from Puccini’s unfinished opera Turandot, is played at volume on a Hammond organ, as two men (one representing a hybrid of Puccini and his fictional prince, Kalaf, the other, an androgynous figure, who is, at times…
Blood and Roses
11 Aug 2011
Multi-sensory journey with history’s courageous women
Edinburgh’s tendency towards the wet would seem an admonishment against a promenade performance. The northeast’s Poorboy, whose raison d’être is the site specific, doesn’t shy away from the less sunny sides of life. Listening via individual headsets…
The Wheel
11 Aug 2011
Innocence lost in war-torn Spain
When we think about war, it is the civilian casualties or soldiers who lose their lives we remember. The children whose innocence is stripped from them, observing the horrors that surround a war zone rarely, if ever, get a mention. In the west, we worry…
Lounge Room Confabulators
11 Aug 2011
Aussie troubadours paying home visits
‘Hello! It’s the Lounge Room Confabulators.’ A voice chimes cheerily through the intercom. The Confabulators – a pair of bearded Australians in Del Monte suits who will be performing an hour-long storytelling show in my home – ascend the stairwell…
Oedipus by Steven Berkoff (after Sophocles)
11 Aug 2011
Archly stylised production from a contrary master
Steven Berkoff has written, directed and taken a key role in this quasi-modern retelling of one of Greek mythology’s most notorious plots, and it’s got his contrary stamp all over it. An odd and stylised production set around a huge, long, Last…
Ten Plagues
11 Aug 2011
Intense, moving Marc Almond-starring plague musical strikes a chord
A one-man musical based on eyewitness accounts of the London Plague of 1665 starring Marc Almond sounds on paper like the kind of parody you’d find on the website fakefringe.com. Indeed, the 80s pop icon seems nervous as he takes to the stage in black…
Leo
11 Aug 2011
Tobias Wegner's vitruoso performance is engaging and imaginative
Leo (played by multi-talented German performer Tobias Wegner) finds himself trapped in a box room. With a charming innocence, he uses his imagination, his hat, his suitcase and a piece of chalk to ease the anxiety and the tedium. As he does so we see…
Belleville Rendez-vous
11 Aug 2011
Inventive adaptation of Gallic animated classic
The main difference between FellSwoop’s adaptation of Belleville Rendez-vous and Sylvain Chomet’s animated original is the setting: while Chomet jumped right into the life of a pint-sized grandmother and her recently-orphaned bicycle-loving grandson…
The Girl With The Iron Claws
11 Aug 2011
A fairytale for grown-ups
Taking as their starting point a Nordic myth that clearly shares some of its roots with Beauty and the Beast, The Wrong Crowd weave a subtle, dark fairytale about an independent-minded princess who falls in love with a bear (of course, he’s really a…
Allotment
11 Aug 2011
Sweetly observed play taking place on a real allotment with free cup of tea
Whatever happens to Dora and Maddy, the chalk-and-chips sisters at the heart of Jules Horne’s sweetly observed play, you know they will be outlived by their surroundings. The soil beneath their feet, the weeds that have persisted for millions of years…
Anton's Uncles
11 Aug 2011
Chekhov remixed as a highly entertaining divertissement
Four dapperly dressed men cavort with the stage dressings, dance with each other and utter one-liners with a Wildean frivolity. The members of LA’s Theatre Movement Bazaar are so diverting with their antics that this play’s relation to Anton Chekhov’s…
Cutting the Cord
11 Aug 2011
Tragicomedy exploring immigration via young Japanese woman in London
Audience members queueing to enter Cutting the Cord are invited to tell a small wooden box where they’re coming from and where they’re going to. What seems like gratuitous cuteness pays off at the end of this engaging and skilful exploration of the…
Bones
11 Aug 2011
Honest examination of real life on the dole
Nineteen-year-old Mark has just been released from prison to find himself in a world that’s almost as grim as the inside. Drink, drugs, violence and abuse are commonplace, as well as an unhealthy disrespect towards women and authority – likely a result…
Mark Twain Abroad
11 Aug 2011
Dramatic recreation of a lecture by the famous author lacks panache
Purportedly embarking on a round-the-world lecturing tour in order to pay off his ‘considerable debts’, Mark Twain (Todd Wronski) discards the original speech he had prepared in favour of an hour-long discourse on the benefits of travelling. In it, he…
Snails and Ketchup
11 Aug 2011
Dynamic one-man Calvino adaptation
This version of Italo Calvino’s story The Baron in the Trees dispenses with the verbal action and substitutes physical theatre, multimedia and acrobatics to tell its story. Ramesh Meyyappan gives a dynamic performance, transforming into several…
Theatre production Jasmine Gwangju celebrates South Korean democracy
10 Aug 2011
The Gwangju uprising in 1980 explored in Edinburgh Fringe show
‘Pfweee! Pfweeeeeeeeeee!’ Jun-tae Kim is recreating the noise of fighter jets swooping over the South Korean city of Gwangju. It was 18 May 1980 and he was a young geography teacher, on the streets with thousands of other students and citizens…
