Greg Holstead, Author at North West End UK

15Dec

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

4Play – Traverse Theatre

The Traverse’s 4PLAY has form, a new-writing pressure cooker where short pieces are aired, tested, and occasionally launched into something much larger. Last year’s Colours Run was proof enough that this collective can produce work that grows real legs. This year’s quartet, though, is more uneven, with flashes of real quality offset by structural quirks and the odd misjudgement. The evening opens with Chips by Ruaraidh Murray, a micro-play in every sense. Running no more than seven or eight minutes, it dramatises a real-life Edinburgh gangland robbery, not for cash, but for microchips, with a premise that promises much more than the piece has time to deliver. There’s energy and intent here, but it barely gets started before it’s over. As an amuse-bouche, it’s intriguing, as drama, it’s ...

2Dec

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Beyond Monet – Royal Highland Centre

There’s something delightfully odd about stepping into one of the colossal cattle halls of the Royal Highland Centre and finding yourself transported into Monet’s luminous world of haystacks, lily ponds, and steam trains. Edinburgh’s Beyond Monet is the smaller sibling of last year’s Glasgow Beyond Van Gogh installation, but size, as it turns out, is only part of the story. The Royal Highland Centre, by contrast, offers a more contained, unified volume. Here, the projections encircle you on all four walls with complete synchronicity, transforming the experience into something more cohesive. Instead of moving through fragments and competing tableaux, you sink into a single visual world. Oddly enough, the smaller building produces a bigger emotional effect. The room becomes womb-like, dar...

The Hero’s journey – A story of the story

13Nov

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Blogs

The Hero’s journey – A story of the story

The Hero’s Journey is the narrative equivalent of gravity; invisible, inevitable, and always pulling the story forward. Joseph Campbell mapped it out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: an ordinary person is yanked from their comfortable, familiar world and dropped into a crisis that forces them to grow, guided (and occasionally scolded) by a mentor figure. They return changed, a little battered, a little wiser, and now capable of saving the very world they once fled. It’s a structure that has shaped some of the most enduring stories in cinema. And, curiously, three of the greatest, Alien, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars, all use this mythic skeleton, each twisting it to its own genre and temperament. Alien – The Reluctant Warrior Ridley Scott’s Alien might be set in the i...

8Nov

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Arlington – Traverse Theatre

The most visually remarkable production to grace the Traverse Stage in years, Arlington. This new Shotput production of Enda Walsh’s dystopian fable is a feast for the eyes, ears, and the darker corners of your brain. It is strange, unsettling, sometimes hilarious, and very occasionally infuriating, but it is never dull. The set earns its own applause. Designer Anna Yates places Isla, our imprisoned heroine, on a raised metal platform, roughly level with the third or fourth row of Traverse 1, surrounded by the cold glow of surveillance screens. Behind her, a full wall of projection blooms with shifting images, ghostly fragments, data streams, and hints of an outside world, or what might once have been. The stage picture is technically dazzling, a precise marriage of lighting, sound...

The Gateway Writing Festival: Day 2 – The Studio, Edinburgh

6Nov

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Gateway Writing Festival: Day 2 – The Studio, Edinburgh

Fresh voices, bright ideas, and the occasional spark of brilliance Now in its third year and newly housed at The Studio, the Gateway Writing Festival continues to prove itself as a lively testing ground for emerging Scottish talent. Curated by Artistic Director James Wood and produced in collaboration with Capital Theatres’ Creative Engagement team, with special thanks offered by James to Claire Swanson and Izzy Sivewright for their significant support, each night offers three short plays from young writers paired with equally fresh directors and actors. The second evening’s trio explored power, guilt and the future with youthful boldness and a few rough edges, exactly what you want from a new-writing festival. Utter RadianceWritten by Mayah Reid, directed by Briony Conaghan, with In...

24Oct

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Batshit – Traverse Theatre

There’s a certain audacity to a one-person show. One performer, one story, one mind in charge of the entire evening. Batshit, created and performed by Leah Shelton, turns that control into both its subject and its triumph. In a world quick to label women “mad”, Shelton calmly, stylishly, and with extraordinary precision, takes charge of her own narrative, and everyone else’s for that matter, for sixty taut minutes.When you enter the tight Traverse 2, the first thing that hits you is the bank of LED strips looming above the stage like a silent judge. It’s no decorative flourish: throughout the show, that strip becomes an emotional metronome, pulsing and flickering in unnervingly close rhythm with the sound design. The coordination of light and sound, operated, I assume, from a pre-programme...

To Kill a Mockingbird – Festival Theatre

23Oct

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

To Kill a Mockingbird – Festival Theatre

All rise. Atticus Finch is back in court, and on this particular evening in Edinburgh it isn’t Richard Coyle behind the spectacles but John J. O’Hagan, stepping up from first cover to take on one of American literature’s most beloved men of principle. He does so with quiet assurance. Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird, reborn for the stage by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher, has been touring the UK with glowing tributes. The Edinburgh stop at the Festival Theatre proves both admirable and exhausting, a beautifully acted, morally charged evening that never-the-less feels every minute of its bloated three-and-a-quarter-hour runtime. Sorkin’s adaptation has long been praised for shifting the novel’s moral centre from saintly nostalgia to uneasy realism. His Atticus isn’t carved...

2Oct

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Top Hat – Edinburgh Playhouse

Irving Berlin’s Top Hat taps into the Edinburgh Playhouse this week with more sparkle than a sequinned gin palace, and, in a rare feat, manages to float for two and a half hours without ever feeling heavy. Not just that, the sound is also extraordinary, and for a venue sometimes dogged by poor acoustics, this is a revelation: sound clear as a bell, band fizzing with verve, and an audience leaning in from overture to curtain. For context, Top Hat began life in 1935 as an RKO film directed by Mark Sandrich, a vehicle for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with Berlin supplying the evergreen numbers, “Cheek to Cheek,” “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?”. The stage version we see tonight descends from the 2011 UK adaptation by Matthew White and Ho...

Cauld Blast Orchestra – Traverse Theatre

15Sep

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Cauld Blast Orchestra – Traverse Theatre

Some reunions coast on memory, others roar into the present as if they had never left. Cauld Blast Orchestra’s return to the Traverse is firmly the latter. Born out of Communicado’s Jock Tamson’s Bairns more than thirty years ago, the band has always revelled in being unpigeonholeable. Folk, jazz, rock and classical sit in the same set, stitched with irreverence and played with virtuosity. Founding members remain the backbone. Karen Wimhurst, who first gathered the band together in 1990, is on clarinet for most of the evening, weaving intricate lines that remind you why this music still burns bright. Ian Johnstone dazzles with his versatility, moving between tuba, accordion and piano, each instrument sounding like it’s his true home. Steve Kettley, equally compe...

Edinburgh Days – St. Brides Community Centre

21Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Edinburgh Days – St. Brides Community Centre

There is something stirring at the heart of Edinburgh Days, a new sung-through musical that plants its feet in 19th-century Scotland and tries to tell a story of love, loss and survival against the hardships of the city. It has ambition and flashes of real quality. It also has problems. The creative team is a serious one, Edinburgh-born composer Brian Spence, director Bob Tomson (Blood Brothers), and choreographer Caroline Inglis. That pedigree shows in places: the Celtic-rock inflected score gives the show its own colour, and some of the cast deliver performances of real power. Debbie McKenna, as Mary, is outstanding, a husky-voiced presence who can belt with thrilling intensity. She grounds her character with emotional truth, and her songs are some of the evening’s highlights. Col...