Greg Holstead, Author at North West End UK

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Cathy – Traverse Theatre

Tommy never appears, we don't see him alive, in flashback or even in a photograph. Yet by the end of Eilidh Loan's beautifully observed new play, I felt I knew him. That is quite some trick. Tommy is dead before the story begins, leaving Cathy to negotiate that peculiar new country called widowhood. Elaine C. Smith, making a heroic return to the Traverse stage after 26 years, gives us a woman whose stoicism is matched only by her capacity to find humour in the darkness. And Cathy is surprisingly, wonderfully funny. Not polite theatrical chuckling, but genuine laugh out loud funny. Loan understands something fundamental about grief and perhaps about Scottish families: sometimes you laugh because the alternative is crying. During this performance, plenty of people did both. T...

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Waiting For Wonka – Gilded Balloon

Fifteen years after Willy Wonka opened the gates of his chocolate factory, health and safety has finally caught up with him. And frankly, it has questions. Why, for example, was there no handrail beside the chocolate river? Had there been one, perhaps Augustus Gloop would never have fallen in. And what about Veruca Salt's father, who followed his daughter down the rubbish chute trying to save her? We now discover that he actually died in the furnace. Welcome to Waiting for Wonka, Half Trick Theatre's very funny reimagining of what became of Wonka's unfortunate young visitors once childhood was over and the lawyers, trauma and demands for corporate responsibility arrived. It is a terrific concept and frequently laugh out loud funny. Veruca, Augustus, Violet and Mike are ad...

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It – Summerhall

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It – Summerhall

Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland are rapidly becoming something approaching Fringe royalty. Arriving from New York on crowdfunding in 2022, they won a Fringe First with And Then the Rodeo Burned Down, then repeated the trick in 2023 and 2024. Three consecutive Fringe Firsts inevitably creates expectation. So, is Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It simply riding a considerable wave of hype? Not a bit of it. This year's Summerhall run is sold out, with the show heading almost immediately afterwards to Soho Theatre in London. On the evidence here, that trajectory feels entirely deserved. Rice and Roland, two diminutive New York clowns with painted faces, impressive physical dexterity and an anarchic imagination, play teenage girls in an isolated Appalachian community who, larg...

Kevin!!!!! – Forth at Pleasance Courtyard

9Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Kevin!!!!! – Forth at Pleasance Courtyard

Last year Recent Cutbacks gave me one of my picks of the Fringe. Fly, You Fools! was gloriously inventive, while Hold On To Your Butts proved equally adept at turning a much loved blockbuster into breathless, brilliantly silly theatre. So, I arrived at KEVIN!!!!! expecting another hit. Instead, they have given me Christmas in August. This Home Alone parody may be described as something wildly different from the company’s other Fringe offerings, but there is an irony here. KEVIN!!!!! was originally developed around ten years ago and, having seen what Recent Cutbacks have subsequently become, this feels less like progression and more like a retro step too far. The approach is predominantly puppet led, with handmade miniature s...

9Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Nesting – Summerhall

There are Fringe shows you admire, shows you enjoy, and occasionally shows that remind you why actors act and why people like me continue to write about theatre. Nesting is one of those. Peter McCormick’s new play, directed by Ben Standish, places Billy Mack’s Francis, a man living with motor neurone disease, alongside his pregnant daughter Emma, played with extraordinary emotional commitment by Francesca Hess. As the disease progresses, daughter increasingly becomes carer, until into this painfully recognisable world comes something altogether stranger. Michael Guest’s Gull offers Francis an extraordinary escape. Allow the bird to nest inside him, inhabit his body and somehow release father and daughter from what is coming. It sounds almost impossible on paper. Gues...

Paul Foot: The Future – Belly Dancer at Underbelly

9Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Paul Foot: The Future – Belly Dancer at Underbelly

A sold-out Paul Foot show at the Edinburgh Fringe is hardly a surprise. I managed to snag a very last-minute seat in the front row, which with Foot feels simultaneously like a privilege and a potentially hazardous place to be. Foot has been part of the Fringe landscape for years, developing a particularly devoted following, the self-styled Guild of Connoisseurs, or Leguminati. There is something reassuring about seeing a comedian with such an established audience who still appears determined not to give them quite what they expect. The Future finds Foot in characteristically restless form. His comedy occupies that peculiar territory somewhere between carefully constructed argument and the thoughts of a man whose internal filing system has been struck by lightning. Like a harmless dru...

9Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Best of Burlesque – Assembly Rooms

There are occasions at the Edinburgh Fringe when sitting in the front row feels like a privilege. There are others like, several minutes into Best of Burlesque, you begin to wonder whether you have made a serious tactical error. You live and learn. The problem is not burlesque. Quite the opposite. Burlesque has enormous theatrical possibilities. It can be funny, provocative, sensual, satirical, beautiful and absurd. There can be character, storytelling and invention in the simple act of appearing on stage and gradually removing what you arrived with. But there has to be an idea. Too often tonight, Best of Burlesque seems to consist of people taking their clothes off to music. There isn't enough artistic interpretation or theatrical imagination to turn the act of undressing ...

8Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Wolf of Poyais – Assembly Roxy

There are some stories so extraordinary that the difficulty in putting them on stage is not making them interesting but making the theatre as interesting as the story. The Wolf of Poyais, written by Sam Went and performed by Thom Tuck, takes on one of the most extraordinary confidence tricks in British history, the story of Scottish soldier, adventurer and fraudster Gregor MacGregor, the man who managed to sell people land in a country that did not exist. Born in Scotland in 1786, he became a soldier and adventurer, fought in the South American wars of independence and then performed perhaps his greatest feat of imagination. He invented Poyais. Not merely a piece of land. A country. It had a government, currency, titles, documents, land for sale and, most importantly, inves...

8Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

For Dolores – Traverse Theatre

Two larger-than-life women. One very small lift. Sparks are inevitably going to fly. Eva O’Connor’s For Dolores throws Réaltín, a little Irish star with an inexhaustible capacity for storytelling, together with Mo, a gloriously forthright Glaswegian, in a broken-down lift. What follows is surely one of the great encounters of this year’s Fringe. Lara McDonnell as Réaltín and Catriona Faint as Mo make a classic double act, and an unusually refreshing all-female one. Réaltín embellishes and romanticises, Mo punctures and corrects. When Réaltín recalls romantically “coming off the boat” from Ireland, Mo reminds her that she actually got off a £19.99 Ryanair flight. That rhythm drives the play. A joke becomes an insult, an insult becomes affection, and affection occasionally revea...

8Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Water Colour – Traverse Theatre

There is something very frustrating about a play centred on a painter that never quite convinces you that its protagonist actually paints. Written by Milly Sweeney and directed by Sally Reid, Water Colour arrives in Edinburgh with considerable acclaim and an impressive collection of awards behind it, which makes my reaction to it all the more surprising. I found the writing naive, the storytelling resolutely linear and the theatrical world surrounding its central character’s art strangely unconvincing. The structure is very much: this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Events accumulate but rarely seem to deepen. Molly Geddes as Esme, the young artist at the centre of the story, and Ryan J Mackay as Harris give perfectly reasonable performances, but the writing rarely ...