KJ Ewan, Author at North West End UK

Wildcat’s Last Waltz – Front Room at Assembly Rooms

7Aug

By KJ EwanNo Comments

Scotland

Wildcat’s Last Waltz – Front Room at Assembly Rooms

This is a warm hug of a show. The former Wildcat of Sheffield herself invites you in for a cup of tea and as many biscuits as she can convince you to eat as she takes you through a life of ups and downs and losses and regrets. And I do mean she literally invites you in for a tea and feeds you biscuits – the set is a comfortably old fashioned living room that we’d all probably recognise from some older relative’s house, and we are all ushered up to the table to pour a cup of tea and help ourselves to a custard cream as things get going. It’s a show that moves seamlessly between comedy and tragedy, with the occasional high energy keep fit routine thrown in for good measure. It could perhaps go further in both directions to get closer to something even more cutting and poignant, but there ...

Coma – Summerhall Terrace

Half an hour in a pitch black, binaural horror scape goes by quicker than you’d think. Not for the claustrophobic, Coma is a show where your own fears are pulled from the darkness. Sterile white bunks, each with a set of headphones on the pillow, is what waits for you in the shipping container outside Summerhall. When the lights go out, the darkness is so complete that you can’t tell whether your eyes are open or closed, and you’re left fighting the instinct to flinch as footsteps and voices and undecipherable noises move around you, ebbing closer and further and closer and further. The immersive sound tricks you into thinking that there are things in the darkness with you. Right next to you. Waiting to do things to you. It feels like something nasty is paying very close attention t...

An Oak Tree – Lyceum Studio

Tim Crouch’s fiercely respected set-less, rehearsal-less, prop-less look at how we interact with one another is the most complicated piece of theatre I’ve ever seen. The basic premise is so simple – a hypnotist invites a volunteer on stage – but in only an hour you are tangled up in a precision bit of chaos that is impossible to get out of. And you can’t even go back to make sense of what you saw with a re-watch, because the nature of the play means that each performance is completely unique. This isn’t just because Crouch stars opposite a different actor each night. It’s because each new actor has never read the script or seen the play for themselves before – Crouch simply introduces them to the audience, explains what will happen, makes it clear that they can stop at any time, and ...