Greg Holstead, Author at North West End UK

Jess Fuchs: Feral – Pleasance Bunker Two

17Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Jess Fuchs: Feral – Pleasance Bunker Two

There is a particular Gen Z manipulation of language that I am encountering increasingly at this Fringe. Words are compressed, acronyms appear without explanation and everything is delivered at such speed that, unless you are completely tuned into the vocabulary, the joke can be halfway across Edinburgh before you have worked out where it started. Jess Fuchs's Feral occasionally suffers from this. At one point she references being a “STEM woman”. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, apparently. Perhaps everybody else knew. I didn't. Sometimes Fuchs is simply a little too clever for her own good, or perhaps too determined to demonstrate how clever the language can be. Which is a shame, because when she allows herself room to breathe, Fuchs is very funny inde...

Rosie Jones: I Can’t Tell What She’s Saying – Pleasance Cabaret Bar

17Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Rosie Jones: I Can’t Tell What She’s Saying – Pleasance Cabaret Bar

Rosie Jones has the sort of characteristics that, in considerably darker times, would have put her first in line for persecution: female, disabled and gay. Today, she jokes, they put her at the front of the queue for arts funding. Swings and roundabouts, eh! Two things she definitely can't handle! And that is pretty much the territory of I Can’t Tell What She’s Saying, an hour in which Jones gleefully crashes through almost every boundary between able-bodied and disabled comedy. At one point she confesses that she is only kidding about being disabled. She has been pretending all along, perfecting her iconically slow speech and unstable delivery. She only did it for the money. It is wonderfully outrageous because Jones understands precisely where the boundaries are and then t...

16Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Evita Too – Zoo Southside

ZOO Southside’s Main House is a wonderfully generous Fringe venue, a huge wide stage, properly raked seating and not a bad view in the house. In fact, the stage is so large and voluminous that you could probably roller skate around it naked if you wanted to. Sh!t Theatre, it turns out, wanted to. Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole are one of the funniest double acts at this year’s Fringe. I’ve seen Sh!t Theatre many times before and they never disappoint. EVITA TOO gives them an unusually expansive playground, and they use pretty much all of it. Their starting point is Isabel Perón, Juan Perón’s third wife and the woman who succeeded him as President of Argentina in 1974, becoming the first female president of any country in the world. Yet ask most of us about a Mrs ...

Boy In A Box – Guilded Balloon Patter House

16Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Boy In A Box – Guilded Balloon Patter House

There is something wonderfully unsettling about Paul Coates’ Boy in a Box. This is a single hander that treads a remarkably fine line between humour and some very dark places indeed, including suicide, while somehow finding room for what becomes a fascinating, if increasingly unhinged, lecture on American history. And the box is not theoretical. It is right there. Every now and again, a thump comes from inside it. Whatever, or whoever, is in there wants out: the disenfranchised, the silenced, the forgotten majority? We are told one thing with certainty, whatever is in the box is definitely not white. So, what is it? Black? Brown? Asian? Honduran? All of them? And, more importantly, who is willing to open the box and find out? Coates veers between appearing like a madma...

16Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

ALOK: Eat, Pray, Leave – Pleasance One

If I had to choose one word for Eat Pray Leave, it would be confusing. ALOK is difficult to quantify and, for me, frequently difficult to understand. Having reviewed more than 30 shows at this year’s Fringe, this was comfortably the most densely challenging in terms of language. ALOK Vaid-Menon is an international star, writer, comedian, poet and leading non-binary voice, and there is no doubting the intelligence or purpose behind this hour. ALOK is not here to make trite jokes. They are here to provoke, challenge and demand recognition. I came with an open mind, ready to listen and understand. But I also needed to be let into the conversation. Too often, the language felt constructed for an audience already familiar with its vocabulary and cultural references. I could sense...

16Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

ROLEPLAY – Summerhall

Sex sells. It always has and judging by the sold-out run of ROLEPLAY at Summerhall, it probably always will. The skin-heavy posters are everywhere, the publicity machine has worked extraordinarily well, but there is an uncomfortable question here. Is ROLEPLAY exploiting the very thing it purports to condemn? Written and performed by Hannah Reilly, this one-woman show follows Danni, a feminist podcaster who discovers that sexualising herself brings the attention her more earnest work could not. There is potentially fertile ground here, the commodification of feminism, online identity and the uncomfortable intersection between empowerment and exploitation. Reilly is undoubtedly a committed and energetic performer. My problem is not so much with the performance a...

REDACTED: The Cover-Up of a Cover-Up of a Cover-Up – Pleasance Dome

15Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

REDACTED: The Cover-Up of a Cover-Up of a Cover-Up – Pleasance Dome

Sometimes reviewing at the Fringe is difficult. Sometimes you spend half the walk home wondering what on earth you have just seen and how you are going to write about it. And sometimes they make it very easy for you. REDACTED: The Cover,Up of a Cover,Up of a Cover,Up is brilliant. There is something here that reminds me of the extraordinary Foley work I enjoyed in Fly, You Fools! at the Pleasance Courtyard last year. Voloz Collective take that idea and turn it into something approaching live cinematic Foley, four actors creating an entire visual world while musician Jonny Venvell, tucked into the corner with percussion and strings, does much of the heavy lifting in establishing its sound. The integration is beautiful. Music, movement, sound effects and physical theatre...

Morning Sauna Rave – Sauna Theatre Summerhall

15Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Morning Sauna Rave – Sauna Theatre Summerhall

There is something slightly perverse about setting an alarm to go to a rave. Admittedly, Morning Sauna Rave does not start until 10.30am, but during the Edinburgh Fringe that still feels positively dawn-like. A sunny walk across Edinburgh past Arthur’s Seat certainly helps, and by the time I am stripped down to swimwear and heading into the heat, the prospect of starting the day with music, steam and a cold plunge seems increasingly sensible. This is my latest visit to Sauna Theatre, the extraordinary temporary structure occupying Summerhall’s rear courtyard, on the very spot where Paines Plough’s Roundabout was launched in 2014. Designed for 80 people, it is both the UK’s largest sauna and its first purpose-built sauna arts centre. Having visited before, I remain im...

15Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

This Shining Night – Usher Hall

The concert begins and ends beneath the same shining night, Samuel Barber first contemplating James Agee’s stars, Morten Lauridsen returning us to them at the conclusion. Much has happened in the darkness between. This Shining Night, part of the Edinburgh International Festival’s celebration of choral music, brings the Edinburgh Festival Chorus to the Usher Hall under conductor Sofi Jeannin for a journey through American choral music. It is an intelligently constructed programme; one whose dramatic shape only becomes fully apparent as the evening unfolds. It starts quietly enough. Barber’s Sure on This Shining Night, his 1938 setting of Agee’s poetry, establishes the idea which will eventually bring us full circle. There are beauty and restraint here, but initially I find my...

Dan Rath: Help Me Please – Monkey Barrel Comedy

15Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Dan Rath: Help Me Please – Monkey Barrel Comedy

I descended a labyrinth of stairs into the sub-basement of Cabaret Voltaire to find Dan Rath. Red and blue LEDs light the way through a grungy, stone-arched room, while great lengths of aluminium ventilation snake overhead. It is a fascinating venue, dark, subterranean and atmospheric. No windows here, folks. And, on this occasion, not really much of a window into Dan Rath either. I had been looking forward to this. Rath’s I’m Not Doing Well, Folks is hilarious, a gloriously peculiar, rapid-fire excursion through a mind that seems permanently several steps ahead of its owner. Help Me Please, however, feels surprisingly tired. Perhaps that is simply Rath’s demeanour, but tonight the delivery seems slower, the jokes flatter and the whole thing rather scattergun. There...