Greg Holstead, Author at North West End UK

Little Animals – Traverse @ Lyceum Studio

21Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Little Animals – Traverse @ Lyceum Studio

Paul Ready is a familiar face to television audiences, notably as the wonderfully beleaguered Kevin in Motherland and the considerably more sinister Lee in Utopia, alongside an extensive stage career including work at the National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe. Perhaps those credentials are part of the draw behind the sell-out interest in Little Animals. The question is what happens when Ready strips almost everything away and stands alone in a room with a story to tell. Conceived, written and performed by Ready, and directed by Caroline Steinbeis, Little Animals is ostensibly about his best friend Richard. Ready tells us almost immediately that Richard is dead. He is no longer here. Dead. From that stark beginning, he starts piecing together the life of ...

19Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Pervert Werewolf – Banshee Labyrinth

There comes a point late enough at the Edinburgh Fringe when the normal rules of theatre begin to loosen. At 11.25pm, down in the Banshee Labyrinth, Pervert Werewolf positively encourages them to fall off altogether. You may know the party game Werewolf, or you may not. In its simplest form, everyone is assigned a secret identity. Most are innocent villagers, while hidden amongst them are werewolves who quietly pick off their neighbours during the night. By day, everyone wakes up, argues, accuses, lies, defends themselves and eventually votes on who they think the werewolves might be. Then everyone closes their eyes and night falls again. Pervert Werewolf takes that familiar structure and adds, well, a pervert. The result is essentially Werewolf afte...

19Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

A Better Memory – Pleasance Courtyard

There can hardly be two more different approaches to AI and bereavement at this year's Fringe than An Echo in the Void and A Better Memory. Intriguingly, you can see them almost back to back, and as a theatrical double bill they make fascinating companions. Where An Echo in the Void throws us headlong into the Matrix, asking us to grapple with neural networks, alternative realities and a future where 1.5 billion people have effectively disappeared inside an artificial world, A Better Memory brings everything back home. Literally. Ihsan Kerr's new play is less psychological thriller than homespun domestic drama. Eleanor, played by Lubna Kerr, is a widow living with an Alexa-like device containing an AI reconstruction of her dead husband Harold, pla...

19Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

An Echo In the Void – Assembly Roxy

An Echo in the Void takes a little working out. Unless you have read the programme blurb beforehand, but even then, you may spend much of the opening trying to establish exactly where you are and what the rules of this strange new world might be. So perhaps I can do something the production itself rather fails to do. We are in the future. Sanctuary is an AI programme originally created to help people deal with grief and loss. With some 1.5 billion people apparently using the system, however, something designed as therapy has developed into something considerably more powerful, and potentially more troubling. The really clever idea here is that Sanctuary isn't actually creating your alternative reality. You are. The smells, sounds, images and sensations already exist wi...

Lorna Rose Treen: Now that’s What I Call Characters – Pleasance Courtyard

18Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Lorna Rose Treen: Now that’s What I Call Characters – Pleasance Courtyard

I have reviewed Lorna Rose Treen a few times over the years, through Skin Pigeon and 24 Hour Diner People, so Now That’s What I Call Characters presents something of a dilemma. This is essentially Treen’s greatest hits album, and I already own most of the records. All the favourites are here. The man with guns for hands, the extraordinarily long-armed trucker, the spy and femme fatale, and the Girl Guide proudly displaying the special badge she earned for killing Bin Laden, her terrorist assassination badge, naturally. I particularly enjoy the girl with braces, who keeps popping up throughout the evening. Treen herself remains immensely likeable. Her comedy has always had a bumbling, stumbling quality. Lines occasionally trip over themselves, characters threat...

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream – Pleasance at EICC

18Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream – Pleasance at EICC

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream is certainly different. As I approach the 50-show mark at this year’s Fringe, I have seen nothing quite like this unusual, wordless proposition from Plexus Polaire. It is highly visual theatre, driven by a tremendous score of evocative, purposeful music that carries you along. But does it ultimately carry you anywhere? That is perhaps the difficulty with wordless theatre. Getting from A to B while signalling precisely what is happening along the way requires absolute visual clarity. At its best, Lucy’s Dream is mesmerising, hypnotic and genuinely dreamlike, with human performers and puppets inhabiting an increasingly uncertain world. At other times, it becomes repetitive. There is, it has to be said, quite a lot of Lucy lying on a bed. The ...

The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth – Pleasance Queen Dome

18Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth – Pleasance Queen Dome

The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth sounds like the sort of title somebody might invent at two in the morning during the Fringe. Instead, this new musical from writers Alex Moneypenny and Adam Tuffrey is a remarkably smart, accomplished proposition that may have considerably further to travel. First, a word about the room. The Queen Dome at Pleasance Dome is a beautiful little theatre, nicely proportioned and with really no bad seats. Its onboard lighting and sound kit is among the best I have encountered at the Fringe, and certainly the sound here, in my experience, is never bad and frequently excellent. For a change I sat in the front row, and on this occasion that was probably a mistake. Much of the action spills into the wings and around the front of the audience, meanin...

On Some Far Shore – Greenside George Street

18Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

On Some Far Shore – Greenside George Street

Sometimes the architecture tells you almost as much about a Fringe show as the programme. On Some Far Shore plays in a tiny space, perhaps 40 square metres, with audience on two sides and a playing area barely three metres by three in one corner. This is theatre in your front room, exposing for the performers and with absolutely nowhere to hide. Written by Louis Benneyworth, with book by Benneyworth and Madi Bouchta, this new musical follows Euan, played by Thomas Perry, struggling to write the eulogy for his mother Helen, Nicole Palka, while his girlfriend Isla, Francesca Knoop, attempts to help. It is a piece about grief, memory, storytelling and the people we leave behind. The three performances are strong, vocally and emotionally, but On Some Far Shore nee...

17Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Stamptown – Assembly George Square

Ten years at the Edinburgh Fringe makes Stamptown something of an institution. The problem, perhaps, is that alternative comedy is supposed to kick against institutions, not become one. This particular institution has, sadly, aged like milk. Created and hosted by Zach Zucker, Stamptown has built its reputation on chaos, unpredictability and giving unconventional performers a platform. Here, however, Zucker seemed remarkably reluctant to surrender that platform to anybody else. He was onstage for an extraordinary amount of the evening. At some point, you rather wished he would move over and let the acts on. Unfortunately, when they arrived, they weren't particularly strong either. The notable exception was aerialist Donna Carnow, unquestionably the highlight of the...

The Legend of Queen – Surgeons’ Hall Grand Theatre

17Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Legend of Queen – Surgeons’ Hall Grand Theatre

There are some voices you simply cannot mistake. Peter Marchant gets remarkably close to one of them. Close your eyes during The Legend of Queen and you are pretty much there. Open them and you are definitely not. But that is rather the point. This is not a Freddie Mercury impersonation act, it is an exceptionally accomplished celebration of the music. Marchant particularly captures the compressed, slightly shredded quality of Mercury’s lower register. It is instantly identifiable and extremely well done. At the very top, he cannot quite reach those extraordinary Mercury heights, but two very able backing singers take the sound onwards and upwards. It is clever arranging around a voice that was always going to be almost impossible to reproduce. Musicianship throughout is up ...