Theatre and Mark Fisher

Interview: Alan Cumming on staging a one-man Macbeth

Aberfeldy’s most famous son on the toil and trouble of Shakespeare

25 May 2012

How much doom and gloom can one man take? For most actors, it would be enough of a mental burden to take on the role of Macbeth, the warrior king whose ambition leads to self-destruction. But for Alan Cumming, that’s only the start of it. In a new…

Mark Fisher on The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide

Theatre critic's book of essential advice to aspiring Fringe performers

1 Feb 2012

1 Choosing a title takes ages It’s as straightforward as they come, yet The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide was a title born of months of discussion. The subtitle, How to Make Your Show a Success, was arrived at no quicker. My editor couldn’t believe…

Preview of 2012 - King Lear

New Citizens Theatre boss Dominic Hill brushes up his Shakespeare

6 Jan 2012

Take on the Citizens Theatre and you take on the past. Any artistic director of the Glasgow institution can only be aware of the building’s history. Opened as the Royal Princess’s Theatre in 1848, it became home to James Bridie’s Citizens’ company in…

Theatre critic Mark Fisher on the Shakespeare productions planned for 2012

Alan Cumming, David Hayman and more to stage the Bard next year

13 Dec 2011

In 1964, the Polish critic Jan Kott published Shakespeare, our Contemporary. The book caused a stir for framing a long-dead playwright through the lens of 20th century totalitarianism. Director Peter Brook was delighted to find a commentator who could…

Jackie and the Beanstalk

Johnny McKnight's panto manages to entertain while challenging traditional gender roles

7 Dec 2011

According to panto dame Dott Von Trott, things have got so bad in the austerity-stricken pantosphere that ‘parents in Bridge of Allan have started firing their nannies and learning their own kids’ names’. Serious times indeed, and there’s something…

Theatre director Vicky Featherstone discusses Abi Morgan-penned drama 27

The play examines themes of aging, loneliness, faith and science

20 Oct 2011

‘You’re such a journalist,’ says Vicky Featherstone when I ask her whether 27 is going to ruffle feathers among scientists and Christians. The play is, after all, about a crisis of faith in a convent provoked by a scientist’s request to study the nuns…

Liz Lochhead discusses her new play, Edwin Morgan's Dreams – and Other Nightmares

The new production will premiere at this year's Glasgay! festival

21 Sep 2011

It’s a sprightly Liz Lochhead who comes into Edinburgh’s Urban Angel for a breakfast coffee – latte with an extra shot – in the midst of a typically whirlwind calendar of deadlines, poetry readings and confabs with theatre directors. This summer she had…

Saturday Night

Matthew Lenton and Vanishing Point further explore the themes of 2009's Interiors

13 Sep 2011

In 2009, one play dominated the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland. Picking up the gongs for best director, ensemble and production, Interiors by Glasgow’s Vanishing Point was a performance of startling originality. Inspired by a play by Maurice…

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg

Theatre director Phillip Breen discusses forthcoming adaptation of Peter Nichols' play

13 Sep 2011

Phillip Breen is only 32, but already he has the honour of straddling three regimes at the Citz. Straight out of university in 2003, he was taken on by Philip Prowse to direct The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, returning at the invitation of Jeremy…

One Thousand and One Nights

Flagship EIF production feels like a rediscovery of a lost classic

22 Aug 2011

There’s a tremendous life force pulsating through director Tim Supple’s reclamation of these ancient folk tales. It’s a life force that exists, most palpably, for Houda Echouafni’s Shahrazad, whose survival depends on her ability to spin a yarn and…

(g)Host City

Edinburgh audio tours from spoken word performers

18 Aug 2011

First thing in the morning, I’m standing on top of Calton Hill looking out to Arthur’s Seat, Princes Street and the Pentlands. It’s a view I never tire of, but on my headphones Jenny Lindsay is giving a different message. ‘Edinburgh, you old tart,…

Und

Tough play with the meaning stressed out

17 Aug 2011

Howard Barker is a playwright loved by academics for the challenges thrown down by his knotty ‘theatre of catastrophe’ and by actors for the chance to get their tongues round his muscular language. His writing is tough, poetic and…

Emergence

Death becomes the Pachamamas

17 Aug 2011

It’s always tricky to deal with grief on stage. By its nature, it is an emotion that comes after the fact, making an audience feel it has missed out on the main event. It cannot be resolved in the way any other dramatic conflict is resolved. This…

The Golden Dragon

Global stories to take away

12 Aug 2011

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…

Allotment

Sweetly observed play taking place on a real allotment with free cup of tea

11 Aug 2011

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…

Man of Valour

Mime and punishment

8 Aug 2011

Haven’t we been through this before? Wasn’t it some time in the 1970s we stopped being dazzled by mime artists? Didn’t we pretty quickly realise the means of telling a story are never as interesting as the story itself? It seems not in the case of…

101

Group hugs, cult chants and it’s all your fault

8 Aug 2011

Back with three new immersive scenarios after causing a stir last year, the 101 team show just how compelling theatre can be with the most elementary of resources. No special effects, no set, scarcely anything you’d call a costume and yet the young…

Elegy

Moving story of a flight from persecution

8 Aug 2011

The last time Douglas Rintoul was in Scotland was to direct a revival of David Greig’s Europe at Dundee Rep. There’s something of the flavour of that migratory play in this powerful production for the internationally minded Transport company, as actor…

The One Man Show

Late-night high-tech deconstruction with Jaffa Cakes

5 Aug 2011

So post-modern it hurts, The One Man Show is a piece of theatre about watching a piece of theatre. It has a mysterious start, a set of emotional states, a philosophical moment where we cough and eat sweets, a cheesy musical interlude and a point when we…

Uncompromising take on One Thousand and One Nights at 2011 EIF

Centrepiece theatre production of Edinburgh International Festival 2011

7 Jul 2011

It begins in classic once-upon-a-time style. 'A long, long time ago lived two kings who were brothers,' goes the opening line of One Thousand and One Nights. 'The elder, King Shahrayar, ruled India and Indochina. The younger, Shahzaman, ruled…

Theatre, music and dance highlights from the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Semiramide and King Lear among picks

7 Jul 2011

The Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) has been a benchmark for quality and innovation in the performing arts since its inauguration nearly 65 years ago. This year artistic director Jonathan Mills builds his programme around the multi-faceted…

Preview: Dennis Kelly's After the End to be staged by both the Citz and Dundee Rep

25 Apr 2011

When actors Jonathan Dunn and Nicola Daley take their final curtain call in June, they will say goodbye to After the End. But fear not. After the end of that After the End, it will be time for another After the End. That’s because, in a rare moment…

Ivan and the Dogs explores notion of feral children

Theatre piece based on true story of Ivan Mishukov

18 Mar 2011

You wait 18 months for a play about feral children, then two come along at once. Not since NIE’s My Life with the Dogs in the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe have we heard the true story of Ivan Mishukov, a four-year old boy from Moscow who lived with a pack of…

The rising stars of Scottish theatre

Interviews with Helen Darbyshire, Gary McNair, Gemma McElhinney, Katy Wilson and Scott Fletcher

7 Mar 2011

Helen Darbyshire Age: 22 Where will I know her from? She’s on Dundee Rep’s graduate scheme, which gives a year-long contract to promising actors straight out of college. Brought up in nearby Cupar, she introduced herself to Dundee audiences in a minor…

Sir Derek Jacobi ready to tackle role of King Lear

Michael Grandage director builds production around 72-year-old actor

24 Feb 2011

‘You would never do Lear without an actor in mind,’ says Michael Grandage. The outgoing director of London’s Donmar Warehouse has had just such an actor in mind for several years. He has built his acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy…

Production of Mother Courage and her Children set for tour

Alison Peebles tackles Bertolt Brecht’s study of economic survival

24 Feb 2011

‘She’s like a lioness with her cubs – she keeps them close,’ says Alison Peebles preparing to take on the formidable title role of Mother Courage, the powerhouse at the heart of Bertolt Brecht’s study of economic survival in the 30 Years’ War. She is a…

Just Checking charts bride-to-be whose OCD is getting the better of her

Very physical piece from Taggart actor

16 Feb 2011

For an actor, no job is for life. Not even when you’re the star of Britain’s longest running cop show. So when Blythe Duff (aka DI Jackie Reid) found herself in between series of Taggart in 2009, she thought it would be prudent to have another string to…

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice set for Dundee Rep

Classic Ugly Duckling story of a young person overcoming life’s obstacles

11 Feb 2011

It was good news for Helen Darbyshire when she checked in with the voice doctor. Before committing to the part of Little Voice in Jim Cartwright’s play, she wanted to be sure her vocal chords were up to the task. This is a character whose pathological…

Manipulate festival - Puppetry and animation festival avoids the P word

Traverse season features cult animation and visually arresting films

14 Jan 2011

Simon Hart is trying not to use the P word. When he describes his annual Manipulate festival, he prefers to call it a celebration of visual theatre (with the teasing strap line: ‘innovative theatre arts for consenting adults’) than to say anything about…

The Story Of How We Came To Be Here ...

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan make move from visual art to theatre

23 Nov 2010

The Story Of How We Came To Be Here, What We Did Before We Got Here, How You Have Forgotten Why You Asked Us Here And Why We Cannot Remember Why We Came, Or: Is This What Brings Things Into Focus? Every time Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan submit a…

Sea and Land and Sky historically unconvincing despite wartime diary source

Pretty speeches have little narrative momentum

27 Oct 2010

‘The only thing that scares us is a dying child,’ says Carmen Pieraccini as Lily, a Scottish nurse facing a burning village on the World War II frontline. It is an image of wartime heroism we are not used to seeing. In Abigail Docherty’s play, winner of…

Jeremy Raison's production of A Clockwork Orange

Swansong show from Citizens Theatre director

29 Sep 2010

Jeremy Raison says one of his favourite films is Brazil. Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece is part of a sub-genre known as ‘retro-futurism’, as if someone in the 1940s had predicted what the 1980s would be like. For Raison, who is directing A Clockwork…

Alison Peebles on how theatre show Dirty Paradise was inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

23 Sep 2010

Alison Peebles tells Mark Fisher how a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story opened up a world of auditory hallucinations

Creator of Trilogy returns with new play Fatherland, Motherland

New play from Nic Green at Arches Live

16 Sep 2010

Ask Nic Green where she thinks of as home and she has an immediate, if surprising, answer. ‘Nowhere,’ she says. ‘This is the problem.’ The creator of the celebrated Trilogy (returning to the Arches in November for a brief run) which prompted feminist…

Porgy and Bess

French company take Porgy and Bess to the Deep South

22 Aug 2010

When Opera de Lyon’s Porgy and Bess is remembered, it will be for the extraordinary multimedia staging by the directorial double-act of Jose Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu. It isn’t only that we get 50-odd performers on stage - the dancers giving it…

The Edinburgh Fringe shows taking human trafficking as a theme

Roadkill and Lost Boy amongst Fringe shows telling refugees' stories

29 Jul 2010

A celebrity endorsement works wonders for your box office and all power to Shatterbox for getting Emma Thompson to put her name to its production of Fair Trade. But that show is only the most high profile in an unprecedented wave of Fringe productions…

Little Black Bastard deals with horrific Australian childhood

Noel Tovey puts disturbing past of poverty and crime on stage

29 Jul 2010

It is the ultimate rags to riches story. Yet the tale Noel Tovey tells about himself is more distressing than any version of Cinderella. It is a narrative that shocked even his closest friends when he chose to tell it to the world in Little Black…

More Light Please delivers emotional take on economic migration

One-woman Fringe show drawn from experience of moving from Poland to Ireland

27 Jul 2010

Natalia Kostrzewa is sitting in the courtyard of Warsaw’s Teatr Praga, enjoying the early evening air. She’s just performed her one-woman show, More Light Please, drawn from her experiences of moving to Ireland, and is delighted to have delivered it in…

Freefall captures mood of bewilderment moments before death

Dublin theatre group's Fringe show captures mood of the times

27 Jul 2010

It would be misleading to say the latest play by Dublin’s Corn Exchange was about the credit crunch, the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and the scandals within the Catholic church, but those events were playing out when Freefall was created last year and…

Diciembre finds dark humour in Chile's Pinochet years

Teatro en el Blanco go back to basics with politically engaging EIF production

16 Jul 2010

The Pinochet years continue to leave a deep scar on the Chilean psyche. Playwright Guillermo Calderón tells Mark Fisher why Diciembre tackles some dark memories but still finds humour in his nation’s tortured past

Ontroerend Goed bring Teenage Riot to the Edinburgh Fringe

Renowned Belgian theatre group explores teenage angst

15 Jul 2010

Everyone who visits Alexander Devriendt in the rehearsal room says he must be crazy. He is 33 years old, yet he thrives on working with the most exuberant of teenagers. ‘It’s not about wanting to stay young, I don’t think about it,’ says the Belgian…

Five theatre shows from the continent at the Edinburgh Fringe

15 Jul 2010

More Light Please Polish actor Natalia Kostrzewa stars in her own one-woman play (co-written by Jerzy Lach) about economic migration. The production by Teatr Praga is in English and features music by the Tiger Lillies. New Town Theatre, George…

Peter Brook's 11 and 12 marks director's return to the Glasgow and Tramway he transformed

22 Mar 2010

Let’s start with some history. Throughout the 20th century, Glasgow was as dangerous as it was dreich. You couldn’t leave your tenement slum without being stabbed. It was a bonus if you avoided a head-butting. A trip to the steamie or even to your…

The National Review of Live Art 30th anniversary

25 Feb 2010

It all seems wrong. The National Review of Live Art has built its reputation on change. It never looks back and never stays still. The annual bonanza of what used to be called the avant garde has doggedly embraced the disconcerting, the deviant and the…

Primary School Musical

17 Dec 2009

Fed up with the me-me-me narcissism of High School Musical? Hankering for the chutzpah of Bugsy Malone? Longing to see a song-and-dance show that has a built-in call to political action? Well, the opportunity is here with Primary School Musical, a…

The Silver Darlings

3 Sep 2009

There’s something cinematic about Kenny Ireland’s staging of the Neil M Gunn novel, adapted here by Peter Arnott. It’s in the sepia photographs of crofts, brochs and cliffs that form a backdrop to Hayden Griffin’s open set of layered coastal rock. It’s…

If That’s All There Is

Cynical piece of work

24 Aug 2009

Less a play than a series of sketches, this show created by Inspector Sands is about a couple of maladjusted professionals approaching their wedding day. Wittily staged, it has some good gags about the bureaucratic mindset, but it is ultimately a…

The Doubtful Guest

The Gorey details

20 Aug 2009

That Hoipolloi’s staging of the Edward Gorey fable is entertainingly done is without question. It is not only an adaptation of this story about a pointy-faced creature in white canvas shoes who takes residence in a grand country mansion, but also an…

East 10th Street: Self Portrait with Empty House

Three storeys of NYC stories

13 Aug 2009

Edgar Oliver will not be the only actor taking on the Everyman persona this August. Like innumerable stand-up comics and solo performers, he presents himself as the still centre of a chaotic world. By identifying with him, we can share his strange…

Funny

An inability to see the potential in a great idea

12 Aug 2009

There’s a great idea behind Tim Nunn’s new play for Glasgow’s Reeling & Writhing about the army’s use of humour to interrogate suspects. Instead of tackling the clash of comedy and combat head on, however, the playwright gets distracted by his…

The Hotel

The suite smell of success

10 Aug 2009

If Punchdrunk, the fashionable London site-specific theatre company, gave the job of artistic director to Arthur Smith, the comedic genius behind the Fringe’s Arturart exhibitions, the results would look a lot like The Hotel. Throw in a touch of Fawlty…

Beachy Head

Suicide brings on many changes

10 Aug 2009

Like its predecessor, Mile End, Analogue’s Beachy Head is as much about the way the story is told as it is about the story itself. No scene goes by without a screen being wheeled on, a video camera being focused or an actor tottering in front of a…

Sea Wall

Pray silence for an exquisite performance

8 Aug 2009

Alex does not voice the cruellest words he ever spoke. We don’t actually hear the dreadful phrase he utters to his father-in-law. But we can imagine it. Playwright Simon Stephens is too subtle a craftsman to allow his central character to blurt it out…

Bourne to be wild - Mark Ravenhill interview

New show based on flamboyant gay theatre icon Bette Bourne

6 Aug 2009

Mark Ravenhill is making a habit of redefining what a Fringe play can be. Two years ago, his Ravenhill for Breakfast offered ever growing crowds a chance to see a daily changing programme of short plays written almost as fast as they could be performed…

Man for all seasons - Phil Nichol at the Fringe

Mark Fisher finds Phil Nichol mining two rich seams of comedy at this year’s Fringe

23 Jul 2009

One is a Restoration farce typically performed by seasoned rep actors on grand proscenium-arch stages. The other is a scabrous heist comedy in which a middle-management executive is kidnapped in a Fife factory.

Naked ambition - Nic Green's 'Trilogy'

Mark Fisher meets the theatre-maker who’s still proud to call herself a feminist

23 Jul 2009

Nic Green was leading a discussion recently when a young man questioned her use of the word ‘feminism’. ‘No one wants to hear that word, can’t you call it womanism?’ he asked.

Mercy Madonna of Malawi

Adopting a view of the Material Girl

21 Jul 2009

It’s reasonable to assume Robert Magasa never expected to land his latest stage role. He is tall, male and black and speaks with a distinct Malawian accent, characteristics that should disqualify him from playing Madonna, a pop star famous for being…

The World's Wife

Visceral poetry from the new laureate

20 Jul 2009

You can't fault Linda Marlowe for timing. No sooner had the original Oh! Calcutta star and Berkoff protégé decided to adapt Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife for the stage, than the Glasgow-born Duffy landed the job of poet laureate. An hour or so…

Brian Friel retrospective includes Faith Healer, The Yalta Game and Afterplay

Three plays by the Irish Chekov

13 Jul 2009

At the head of the pantheon of Irish dramatists there is JM Synge, there is Sean O’Casey and there is Brian Friel. As far as director Patrick Mason sees it, there is no question: Friel is Ireland’s greatest living writer. ‘It’s an amazing opus,’ he…

Anna Reynolds - Stand by Your Van

Drama about a Texas car dealership's hands-on competition

13 Jul 2009

Stand by Your Van explores the game show where contestants hold onto a vehicle for up to 100 hours. Mark Fisher gets bleary-eyed at the prospect

Talking life and death at Beachy Head

A new drama by Fringe First-winning company Analogue

13 Jul 2009

I’m not saying Liam Jarvis is morbid, but after the co-director’s 2007 Fringe First-winning hit Mile End – the true story of a man pushed in front of a London underground train – he is back with Beachy Head, best known as East Sussex’s most picturesque…

Giorgio Battistelli's Experimentum Mundi and Fair is Foul, Foul is Fair

Revolutionary sonic collaboration between composers and craftsmen

13 Jul 2009

Giorgio Battistelli is demonstrating the rhythm of a conventional piece of classical music. ‘Peak-peak-peak-peak,’ he counts out. By contrast, he says, the beat of a shoemaker’s hammer is altogether less regular: ‘Tic-tic-tack, tic-tic.’ That was the…

Balgay Hill - Simon Macallum

28 May 2009

Today we associate Dundee with the enterprising work of Dundee Rep’s ensemble, the world-class art at DCA and the tourist attractions of the City of Discovery. It’s a place the Victoria and Albert Museum can consider setting up a northerly outpost…

The Ducky

14 May 2009

Douglas Maxwell better watch out. Until last year the playwright had cornered the market in whimsical comedies about Ayrshire teenagers. Then along came DC Jackson with The Wall – in which a gang of Stewarton youngsters crossed the threshold from…

After Mary Rose

30 Apr 2009

Collaborating with director Nicholas Bone of Magnetic North, playwright D Jones has given JM Barrie’s 1920 ghost story Mary Rose a dust down so it has less of the creaky haunted house about it and more of the privations of war. But in structure and…

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

11 Dec 2008

ADAPTATION If you’re in doubt about the Christian allegory lurking behind the Narnian fantasy of CS Lewis, just look at the treatment meted out to Daniel Williams as Aslan in this stage adaptation. Relinquishing power to Meg Fraser’s scarily…

Pantomimes

27 Nov 2008

Earlier this year, I took a trip to Scarborough to check out the headquarters of the Qdos Entertainment empire. This is the organisation responsible for 21 pantomimes in the UK alone, not to mention a handful of theatres, a couple of talent agencies…

Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us

27 Nov 2008

NEW PLAY It’s hard to shake off the feeling that this final production in the National Theatre of Scotland’s series of Traverse Debuts is set in a bygone era. The story of a young man returning home from the seminary, disillusioned with Catholicism…

Heer Ranjha (Retold)

27 Nov 2008

NEW PLAY Two kids from opposite sides of the tracks. She’s a glamorous socialite, daughter of the owner of a successful chain of Scottish restaurants and a Sikh of Punjabi origin. He’s a suicidal job-seeker who’s never left the country and, although…

4.48 Psychosis

13 Nov 2008

MODERN CLASSIC It doesn’t seem right to say you have enjoyed Sarah Kane’s final play. Written not long before her suicide in 1999 and staged posthumously, it is a poetic evocation of the mind of someone in the depths of clinical depression. There are…

Cockroach

30 Oct 2008

It sneaks up on you unexpectedly, this full-length debut by Sam Holcroft. At first, she gives the impression of writing a lightweight comedy of high school life; all cat-fights, smashed windows and detentions. But something is afoot in the biology…

Marat/Sade

30 Oct 2008

Call it a testament to the human spirit or the will to triumph in the face of adversity, but for some reason, after the interval, the audience comes back. Perhaps, they are thinking, it is a mistake to imagine the acting is terrible. Maybe, they hope…

The Caretaker

16 Oct 2008

CLASSIC Directing a classic Harold Pinter play is, says Philip Breen, like staging an opera, so exactly is it written. ‘Every pause is written for a reason and he’s always right,’ says the director, returning to the Citz after his successes with…

Moonwalking

16 Oct 2008

NEW PLAY Her play clocks in at less than an hour and will be performed in front of an audience eating their lunch, but you can’t fault Nicola Wilson for ambition. Moonwalking, part of Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint season, considers nothing less…

Gerry Mulgrew - The Lesson

2 Oct 2008

Gerry Mulgrew is a smart director, but when he’s in the rehearsal room he prefers to work from instinct. ‘I respond to Peter Stein when he says a director should have unlimited enthusiasm and absolutely no idea of what he’s going to do,’ says the man…

Sunset Song

2 Oct 2008

ADAPTATION It was some time in the early-60s when His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, last produced a play of its own, barring the annual pantomime. To return to the fray with a ten-strong company and a mainstage tour after so long was ambitious but…

Don Juan

2 Oct 2008

CLASSIC John D is a 21st century mover and shaker. He sets up meetings with celebrities, has his photograph on billboards and indulges in high-profile charity work. He is all ego and, as played by Mark Springer, both charismatic and…

Cryptic Productions

2 Oct 2008

Cathie Boyd takes her research seriously. She wasn’t comfortable directing a modern opera set in the Caribbean without getting a proper sense of the place. So, at the start of this year, she took a trip to Haiti. ‘I wanted to know what Haiti looks and…

Offshore

2 Oct 2008

NEW PLAY It’s easy to imagine that the countryside exists without money. With all that fresh air, isn’t cash just a distraction? Of course, just as the wilderness is actually the result of centuries of industrial exploitation, so the rural population…

Fleeto

2 Oct 2008

NEW PLAY No doubt it’s Fleeto’s origins as a piece of lunchtime theatre in A Play, a Pie and a Pint that mean this revival by Glasgow’s V.amp is stripped back and elemental. The set amounts to nothing more than a table and a couple of chairs – and…

Cherry Blossom

18 Sep 2008

What does the word ‘collaboration’ make you think of? Director Lorne Campbell thought he knew until he tried it for himself. ‘You think of something cosy and cuddly,’ he says. ‘But this has been really hard. We’re still friends, still happy and excited…

Six Acts of Love

18 Sep 2008

NEW PLAY The Scottish Government’s Homecoming programme is not until next year, but Ioanna Anderson is getting in early. At the age of 38, she’s planning to move back to her native Edinburgh after spending the best part of 20 years in Ireland, where…

Mother Courage And Her Children

18 Sep 2008

CLASSIC It’s an austere landscape through which Ann Louise Ross drags her cart, scratching a living in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s epic. Naomi Wilkinson’s set is a wall of grim metal panels, the stage a carpet of grey. Even the iconic cart is…

Macbeth

4 Sep 2008

The last time Liam Brennan starred as Macbeth it was in a modern-day interpretation in Musselburgh in which the soldiers wore khaki, news was conveyed by TV screen, and when the thane of Cawdor heard bells it was the sound of his mobile. Ten years…

Don Juan

Juan for the ladies

4 Sep 2008

Misogynist, sex god or libertine? Don Juan is all this and more, as theatre director Jeremy Raison tells Mark Fisher

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…

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…

4.48 Psychosis

Painful journey into despair

16 Aug 2008

Having seen Grzegorz Jarzyna's mesmerising production of this Sarah Kane play on the intimate stage of TR Warszawa in Poland, I was concerned the playwright's sad mediation on suicide would lose its intensity on the bigger stage of the King's. I needn't…

Jidariyya

Palestinian end game

15 Aug 2008

There's a sad irony that a play about mortality should open in Edinburgh only days after the death of its author. Mahmoud Darwish was a major Palestinian poet and his Jidariyya was a response to a life-threatening heart attack a decade ago. It was…

Bite the Dust

Polish satire lost in translation

14 Aug 2008

First there is the show that should have been. Originally staged in the late-70s, Bite the Dust is a satirical sideswipe at the military mindset. It proved so controversial in Poland that playwright Tadeusz Rólewicz withdrew the performance rights.

Class Enemy

A different class

14 Aug 2008

When Nigel Williams’ Class Enemy made its debut at London’s Royal Court in 1978, hip hop was still a phenomenon of the American underground. It would never have occurred to a director to incorporate it into this portrayal of a bunch of teenagers in a…

Surviving Spike

The taming of the Goon

14 Aug 2008

He was a maverick, a one-off, a free-associating comedy anarchist. So what’s the point in paying tribute to Spike Milligan with a bio-play that is safe, conventional and cosy? The tone of Surviving Spike by Richard Harris has far more in common with the…

Dybbuk

Jewish ghost story fails to haunt

11 Aug 2008

The idea to combine two different treatments of the Jewish myth of the dybbuk is inspired. In sandwiching together the play by Szymon Anski, a traditional drama about a woman possessed by the spirit of her dead lover, and a modern story by Hanna Krall…

A Drunk Woman Looks at The Thistle

Scotland in a Mina key

7 Aug 2008

If Liz Lochhead had continued the opening speech of Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off for another hour, it could have sounded a lot like A Drunk Woman Looks at the Thistle. Written by crime novelist Denise Mina as a response to Hugh…

The Tailor of Inverness

Stitching up the 20th century

7 Aug 2008

Matthew Zajac's father used to tell a story about how to catch a fox. The method is to get the creature in the open then circle it. As long as you complete the circle, the fox will stay grounded. Then you spiral inwards and take your prey. Zajac does…

Global Warming is Gay

Heggie raises the temperature on saving the planet

7 Aug 2008

Lifestyle choice? Ethical dilemma? Or is going green just a bit gay? These are the questions posed by playwright Iain Heggie as he gently satirises our responses to the new eco-orthodoxy. For opportunistic Green MSP Graham Orbison, the drive to save…

Terminus

Mesmerising monologues create filmic theatricality

7 Aug 2008

There are those who think Mark O'Rowe's style of writing does not constitute theatre at all. Certainly, his preference for interlinking monologues over conversational exchanges has more in common with storytelling than drama. Yet, the more his passages…

Teenage kicks - Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen

5 Aug 2008

Belgium’s Ontroerend Goed climbs down from the roof to show the positive side to adolescence, finds Mark Fisher. Alexander Devriendt has been hanging out with the kids. The Belgian director has been working with 13 teenagers on a show for grown-ups…

Terminus

Angels, demons and reincarnation from the master of the monologue

31 Jul 2008

‘I still like the Catholic religion even though I don’t believe in God,’ says Mark O’Rowe, the Dublin master of the monologue. That may or may not explain why the latest play by the author of Howie the Rookie and Crestfall is what he calls a…

Early mourning - 4.48 Psychosis

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

Nine years ago, uncompromising playwright Sarah Kane ended her own life. In an old Warsaw variety theatre, Mark Fisher is shaken by a mesmerising staging of her final work.