Greg Holstead, Author at North West End UK

6Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Coffee With Sugar – Traverse Theatre

There are moments in Coffee with Sugar at the Traverse Theatre when the senses are so thoroughly engaged that conventional critical distance simply gives way. Smell, sound, movement and image collide in ways that feel genuinely intoxicating, even overwhelming, in a production that prioritises sensory immersion over narrative drive. The show forms part of the Manipulate Festival, one of the many festivals Edinburgh hosts throughout the year, and arguably one of the most consistently rewarding. Dedicated to visual theatre, puppetry and experimental performance, Manipulate reliably delivers work that foregrounds audio visual invention and formal risk taking, and Coffee with Sugar unquestionably lives up to that billing. The piece is led by Laia Ribera Cañénguez, who also created the wor...

Drawing The Italian Renaissance – King’s Gallery, Holyrood Palace

14Jan

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Drawing The Italian Renaissance – King’s Gallery, Holyrood Palace

This is an excellent exhibition, inspiring, beautifully curated, and quietly revelatory. Drawing the Italian Renaissance does something deceptively simple but profoundly effective, it brings us closer to the act of thinking itself, as revealed through the drawn line. But first, a little historical background – on paper. Far from being the boring commodity that Ricky Gervais parodies in the iconic The Office, paper was exciting and new and suddenly abundant. Before the Renaissance, drawing was constrained as much by material as by imagination. Paper, though known in Europe from the medieval period, was scarce and relatively expensive, and artists instead relied on vellum, made from animal skin, which was costly and ill-suited to exploratory or repetitive work. From the mid-fifteenth cent...

Jamie Leonard, Wonder Boy – Edinburgh International Magic Festival

1Jan

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Jamie Leonard, Wonder Boy – Edinburgh International Magic Festival

As my final show in this year’s Edinburgh Magic Festival, Wonderboy brought energy, charm and an undeniable sense of youthful confidence. Performed at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Jamie arrives fresh from a successful 2025 Edinburgh Fringe run and clearly comfortable in front of an audience. This boy unquestionably knows his way around a stage. There’s a strong theatrical instinct at work here, allied to a rubber-faced expressiveness that plays very effectively to a mixed crowd. At just 17, his confidence is impressive, and he leans into his age with a stream of schoolboy humour and routines that feel knowingly pitched rather than apologetic. It’s a sensible strategy, and one that allows him to sidestep the trap of pretending to be more seasoned than he is. That said, ...

Insane Christmas Magic – Edinburgh International Magic Festival

1Jan

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Insane Christmas Magic – Edinburgh International Magic Festival

There’s always a faint risk with festive spin-offs that the tinsel overwhelms the craft. Happily, Insane Christmas Magic avoids that trap entirely. This is not novelty magic with baubles glued on, it’s proper, high-grade conjuring, lightly dusted with Christmas spirit and delivered by three performers who know exactly what they’re doing. The trio, Cameron Gibson, Elliot Bibby and Luke Osey, are no strangers to Edinburgh audiences. Gibson and Bibby in particular have been round these parts many times before, and it shows. There’s an ease to their stage presence that can’t be faked, relaxed, confident, and quietly assured in a way that instantly settles an audience. No visible nerves, no frantic patter, just a sense that you’re in safe hands. Magically speaking, that’s always a good ...

Tricky Ricky, Jingles All The Way – Edinburgh International Magic Festival

1Jan

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Tricky Ricky, Jingles All The Way – Edinburgh International Magic Festival

There’s a particular challenge to the Christmas morning family show: you’re dealing with excitable children, coffee-deprived adults, and a room that’s already humming before you’ve said a word. Jingles All The Way, Tricky Ricky’s festive offering at the Scottish Storytelling Centre as part of the Edinburgh Magic Festival, meets that challenge with confidence, warmth, and a good understanding of its audience. Ricky pitches his comedy in broadly Shrek-style territory, knowingly silly, fast-moving, and deliberately aimed across the child–adult divide. For the most part, it works. The jokes come thick and fast, the tone is inclusive rather than condescending, and there’s a sense that he’s genuinely comfortable working a mixed-age crowd. That ease is hardly surprising: Ricky has spent many y...

30Dec

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Secret Room – Lauriston Castle

Perched on the edge of the Firth of Forth, Lauriston Castle is one of those Edinburgh buildings that seems to exist slightly out of time. Parts of the structure date back to the 16th century, though what we see today is largely the result of a late-19th-century transformation, when the castle was remodelled into a richly furnished Edwardian home. Passed to the city in the 1920s, it survives as a carefully preserved domestic time capsule, its rooms dense with objects, stories, and a quietly uncanny sense of lives once very fully lived. I’ve also seen performances here as part of the Edinburgh Horror Festival, and the building proves just as effective for horror as it does for magic, lending both genres an atmosphere that feels earned rather than applied. That quality is central to The Se...

22Dec

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Finding Balance – Traverse Theatre

Five writers, five directors and twenty five actors come together for the inaugural event from Balancing Act Theatre. Scratch nights are a little like winter allotments: the soil is cold, the beds are uneven, and what you’re really being asked to admire is not the harvest but the intention. Finding Balance, Winter, hosted by David Gardner and Benedict Hoesl, wears that honesty openly. This is an evening about writers finding their feet rather than actors polishing their shoes, and the Traverse’s Traverse 2 becomes a kind of rehearsal room made public, scripts in hand and possibilities hovering. The temperature of the night is best described as promising but baggy. Five short works in progress make for a long evening, and the cumulative effect can feel diffuse, particularly w...

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...