Greg Holstead, Author at North West End UK

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...

Sexy Circus Sideshow 3.0 – Piccolo Assembly George Square

15Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Sexy Circus Sideshow 3.0 – Piccolo Assembly George Square

Having been rather underwhelmed by my previous excursion into burlesque at this year's Fringe, I am pleased to report that Sexy Circus Sideshow 3.0 is a considerable improvement. Perhaps the clue is in the title. This is less a burlesque show with circus attached than a late night circus and variety show which happens to have rather fewer clothes than usual. And that distinction matters. The International Fringe Burlesque Festival is new to Edinburgh this year, bringing more than 100 international artists together across five daily shows. Sexy Circus Sideshow 3.0, playing at the Piccolo tent in George Square Gardens, is its most ambitious offering, and certainly the most entertaining I have encountered so far. What works is that the entertainment comes first....

14Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Dreamgirl – Zoo Southside

Of the 30-odd shows I've had the pleasure of seeing so far this Fringe, Dreamgirl is certainly the sweetest. To look into the eyes of Norwegian clown and theatre-maker Karen Houge is to look upon someone searching, perhaps even pleading, for a safer, more open and friendlier world. Right now, that particular voice sometimes seems in danger of disappearing into the void. Houge originally intended to make a clown-burlesque show, and indeed first appears in the feathers and glitter of the costume intended for it. I'm rather glad she changed direction. Instead, Dreamgirl grew from her experiences during the 2015 refugee crisis, when she travelled alongside Syrian refugees making their way through Europe. What follows isn't really a play and certainly isn't a le...

Dear Evan Hansen – Assembly Rooms Ballroom

14Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Dear Evan Hansen – Assembly Rooms Ballroom

What a contrast. Barely had The Love-Hungry Farmer packed away his lonely Irish farmhouse before Captivate Theatre arrived in the same Assembly Rooms Ballroom and filled it with the sound, energy and emotional punch of Dear Evan Hansen. This was my first time seeing the musical. I knew several of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's songs independently but seeing them finally placed within Steven Levenson's story was something of a revelation. At its centre is Evan Hansen, played here by Shlok Ramakrishnan, an isolated, socially anxious teenager whose therapeutic exercise of writing letters to himself becomes disastrously entangled with the death of fellow student Connor Murphy. A misunderstanding becomes a lie, the lie gives a grieving family something desperately needed ...

The Love Hungry Farmer – Assembly Rooms Ballroom

14Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Love Hungry Farmer – Assembly Rooms Ballroom

There is something slightly curious about watching a consummate storyteller who, for the first ten minutes or so, appears not quite to trust his own voice. Seamus O’Rourke arrives in the vast 360-seat Ballroom at the Assembly Rooms with perhaps only 60 or 70 of us occupying its front quarter, and initially he is simply too loud. This is intimate storytelling and there is nobody sitting 50 metres away who needs to hear it. O’Rourke virtually shouts at us. For an actor of his experience, it feels oddly uncontrolled. Thankfully, he settles. The Love-Hungry Farmer, adapted by Des Keogh from John B. Keane’s Letters of a Love-Hungry Farmer, introduces us to John Bosco McLaine, a bachelor farmer living in glorious isolation in the south of Ireland. He has his farm, his home and ...

Unexplained Live – theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall

14Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Unexplained Live – theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall

I interviewed Richard MacLean Smith earlier in the Fringe and was intrigued by the trajectory of a man who started the Unexplained podcast in 2016 and has since turned our fascination with things we cannot quite explain into something of a phenomenon, including a book based on the series. I was particularly interested in whether Unexplained Live might represent another step along that trajectory. Danny Robins has travelled similar paranormal territory, ultimately taking 2:22 A Ghost Story onto major stages around the world. Could MacLean Smith eventually follow him? On the evidence here, he may well. For his first Fringe incarnation of Unexplained, MacLean Smith takes us to the remote Flannan Isles in December 1900. Three lighthouse keepers a...

14Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Galloping Cure – Festival Theatre

Oh my God. What just happened to opera? Missy Mazzoli’s The Galloping Cure absolutely blew me away in its first half. Not merely as opera, but as theatre, music and visual spectacle colliding in something that felt, genuinely, like a tipping point. If this is what modern opera is going to be, it has a wonderful life ahead of it. Everything begins relatively straight. The music, the characters, the world. Then gradually it starts to contort. The familiar bends out of shape and suddenly we are somewhere else entirely. There are echoes of The Music Man, flashes of Carousel, and then we seem to tumble headlong into The Matrix, vertical lines of light streaming through the Festival Theatre stage as though we are stepping between realities. At the centre are ...

Bubble Schmeisis (remixed) – Sauna Theatre, Summerhall

14Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Bubble Schmeisis (remixed) – Sauna Theatre, Summerhall

Of all this year’s Sauna Theatre propositions at Summerhall, Bubble Schmeisis (Remixed) perhaps feels the most like theatre. There is good reason for that. Nick Cassenbaum’s one-man show was already a sell-out Fringe and international success long before anybody decided to put the audience into swimsuits and turn up the heat. Ten years on, it has found what feels like its natural home. This is not simply an old stage show squeezed into a sauna. It feels like a genuine evolution of the piece, with Nick now performing the story inside the very environment he has spent years describing. And the experience begins before we even get there. Live klezmer music, created for the show by Daniel Gouly and Josh Middleton, accompanies us as we wait to enter and continues inside, becom...

Boiler Room Six: A Titanic Story – Pleasance Queen Dome

14Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Boiler Room Six: A Titanic Story – Pleasance Queen Dome

I have always been a fan of the one-man show. There seem fewer of them at the Fringe this year, with the two-hander apparently enjoying something of a resurgence. But there is something about the singularity of the form that appeals to me. One performer, complete control, nobody else required to feed the next line. Boiler Room Six: A Titanic Story demonstrates just how powerful that control can be. Written and directed by Tom Foreman, the play takes us into one of the most familiar disasters in history, but from a very different direction. Here we are below decks with Frederick Barrett and the men who kept Titanic alive. This is not the world of evening dress, champagne and sweeping staircases. This is dirt under the fingernails, sweat on the skin, coal dust, heat, steam and...

Salty Brine: How Strange It Is – Summerhall

13Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Salty Brine: How Strange It Is – Summerhall

Weird, uplifting, heartfelt. Salty Brine does not simply perform an album. He takes it apart, rummages around inside it, follows its obsessions down unexpected rabbit holes, then somehow puts the whole thing back together again in front of us. And this particular concoction is no overnight creation, this one has been marinating in Brine for the best part of a decade, part of Salty’s long-running Living Record Collection, in which numerous albums become the starting point for something altogether more theatrical, personal and peculiar. The album at the heart of this one is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, released in 1998, a record whose strangeness and relative unfamiliarity turn out to be one of the show’s great strengths. Unless you are already a...