Mark Fisher

DT Max

Three things compelled DT Max to set about writing The Family that Couldn’t Sleep. Firstly, as a science writer for the New Yorker and New York Times, he had an interest in prions, the rogue proteins behind mad cow disease. The second was personal: he…

La Didone

‘I developed special software for the last couple of pieces,’ says Elizabeth LeCompte, artistic director of New York avant-garders the Wooster Group. ‘Final Cut Pro and Isadora, you know, I was the initial developer.’ Actually, she was nothing of the…

Richard Dawkins

These are combative times to be a God-denier. It’s not only loopy Christians who are trying to make us believe the world was made in a week, now certain Muslims are jumping on the creationist bandwagon. Turkey’s Adnan Oktar, writing as Harun Yahya, has…

Stilted performance

Festival Fringe Stilted performance Mark Fisher goes outdoors in Warsaw to find a Polish Macbeth with the taste of Iraq and the roar of a motorbike

Part of the furniture

It’s the kind of thing any band could have dreamt up on a boozy night after a gig. ‘Instead of playing our guitars and drums,’ one musician would say, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we all played one big instrument?’ Everyone would agree and, of course, they…

The Walworth Farce

Enda Walsh has a lot to thank the Edinburgh Fringe for. It was here in 1997 that the Traverse Theatre hosted a production of his play Disco Pigs.

Girl and Dean

These days everyone wants to use the Fringe as a springboard to fame and fortune. Sketch comedy double act Girl and Dean (aka Jess Ransom and Sarah Dean) may well have their future sorted as they’ll surely be the only Fringe act to be playing the UK…

Lacrimosa

The hit of the 2004 season at Aurora Nova was Chronicles: A Lamentation. Performed by Poland’s Teatr Piesn Kozla (Song of the Goat Theatre) it was one of those rare performances you wanted to watch again the moment it had finished.

The Bacchae

Edinburgh International Festival

Edinburgh International Festival Countdown to ecstasy There’s more to me than fluff and frivolity, insists Perthshire lad Alan Cumming, as he prepares for his most hedonistic role yet. Mark Fisher raises a glass to the god of good times

England

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Edinburgh Festival Fringe Art of the matter Tim Crouch tells Mark Fisher that England is about many things, but they don’t include warm beer and nostalgia

Ravenhill for Breakfast

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Perhaps if he hadn’t been asked to write a column for the Guardian, Mark Ravenhill would never have set himself the challenge of Ravenhill for Breakfast. For each of the 17 morning performances, the author of Shopping and Fucking and, er, Dick…

Auto Auto

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Christian Von Richthofen likes a vehicle to sound good. ‘In Germany it’s the Opel,’ he says. ‘The way the bonnet swings is like an Indian drum. On one side, the mudguards sound like a bass drum and on the other, a conga.’ None of this would interest…

La Didone

For over 30 years, the most unlikely elements have been combined in the Wooster Group’s work. Everything from creaky old B-movies to cutting edge technology have been spliced together to create arresting pieces of theatre.

Aalst

Tramway, Glasgow and on tour

NEW TRANSLATION If you like your theatre cosy, comfortable and reassuring, don’t go within a mile of Aalst. A collaboration between Pol Heyvaert’s Belgian Victoria company and the National Theatre of Scotland, Aalst is the harrowing true-life tale of…

Glasgow Comedy Festival - Chris Addison

MISSION CONTROL

When you look back across the shows Chris Addison has brought to the Edinburgh Fringe over the past decade it’s hard to imagine there might be a unifying idea. What link could there possibly be between Atomicity, a show about the fabric of the universe…

Shadow of a Gunman, The

The Shadow of a Gunman

CLASSIC The temptation with Sean O’Casey’s celebrated Dublin trilogy, which began with The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and continued with Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), is to present them as knock-about Oirish comedies…

Drenched

Touring

NEW PLAY There’s something that doesn’t ring true about playwright Gary Young’s portrayal of a disturbed young woman in Drenched. Played by Melanie Wilson in this 60-minute solo, Cassandra sees herself as a victim of an egotistical mother and a…