Oliver Giggins, Author at North West End UK

The Red Room – Greenside @ Riddles Court

15Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

The Red Room – Greenside @ Riddles Court

The infamous red room of Lorraine Castle is said to be haunted and has seen the deaths of several people. But our protagonist (Ellie Ball) is a sceptic and, despite the warnings from the 3 castle inhabitants, has decided to spend the night in the room, alone. Or is she...? The Red Room was adapted from a story by HG Wells (writer of The War of The Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine, amongst others) by the performer's sister Charlotte Ball. It's told entirely from the point of view of the protagonist and on that single night (with a few semi-flashbacks through tellings of what happened to previous occupants), with only the performer, a torch and a covered mirror in the corner. Ball is an energetic and likable performer, bringing both urgency and the occasional moment ...

Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words – theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall

14Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words – theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall

Created with Elizabeth I writer/scholar, Doctor Carole Levin and starring Tammy Meneghini as the titular queen, this show invites you into a private evening audience with Queen Elizabeth I. Near the end of her reign, she reflects upon its major events and the people she was closest to, told through "her own words", from documented letters, speeches, passages from her own hand, though these are very much augmented by others' words, including letters from Mary Queen of Scots and the Spanish Ambassador, and multiple speeches from the plays of William Shakespeare. This makes sense in the context of the creation of the piece, ie to accompany a visiting exhibit of Shakespeare's First Folio to the campus of the University of Colorado Boulder, though it might lead the casual viewer to...

The Picture of Dorian Gray – the Space On The Mile

10Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

The Picture of Dorian Gray – the Space On The Mile

Oscar Wilde's famous novel (commissioned 125 years ago this month as it happens, during the same dinner that brought back Sherlock Holmes for his second novel) is, in case you didn't know, about a man who gives up his soul to have his portrait age instead of him. It is presented here in a new adaptation curtesy of ETC Theatre Company, promising "a fast-paced adaptation featuring music, slapstick and plenty of Wildean wit". While I'm not sure I'd agree with the last part of that description outside of the lines plucked straight from the novel - can anything be called Wildean when it includes dancing to Abba and Robbie Williams? - the first two are indeed here in buckets and the show is a joyously silly farce from beginning to end which had its audience laughing throughout. Playing...

Suggestions of the Unexpected – The Space @ Surgeon’s Hall

10Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Suggestions of the Unexpected – The Space @ Surgeon’s Hall

The creators of Any Suggestions, Doctor? The Improvised Doctor Who Parody (who are also called Any Suggestions) return after a limited 2023 Fringe run with their improvised anthology in the style of The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, or whatever that Roald Dahl TV series was called. With three tales mixing the supernatural and the morality tale - always with humour of course - there is much variety on show, and being a show that changes every night, this is one of the rare occasions when I can illustrate my point without fear of spoilers. On the night I attended, the stories we saw involved an AI (kind of) taking over the world, witchcraft to win a tiddlywinks championship, and a pheasant infestation in an ancestral manor, all based on answers to questions asked of the audience by the...

The Faustus Project – C Arts, Alto Studio

9Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

The Faustus Project – C Arts, Alto Studio

Doctor Faustus is universally known as the man who sold his soul to the devil, and that basically sums up the play by Christopher Marlowe. Remembered as a scholar and a rebel, Marlowe's play is actually quite reactionary, very much boiling down to, between patriotic swipes at the papacy, "I want knowledge, consequences be banned! "No, don't have knowledge, you'll be damned!", "oh no I had knowledge but now I'm damned!', like the College Humour Ye Old Black Mirror sketch played straight. As such, it seems a good frame to riff off of, which Half Trick Theatre have done by casting a new actor in the main role each night with no knowledge of the show, with all the comedic opportunities for embarrassment and confusion that offers. The secret to all these shows is the cast themselves, ...

6Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Ghost Light – the Space @ Niddrie St

In 1865's London, aspiring author Henry Webster befriends Edward Price at the local Ghost Club. The latter tells Henry about a real haunting at a nearby lodging-house, where the ghosts of two young children apparently wander the house in search of light... The two men decide to investigate. Orange Works' Ghost Light is a classic ghost story, being set in Victorian England, including candlelight wanderings, ghostly children's chants and vengeful spirits. It even name-checks the most famous ghost-story writer of the era, Charles Dickens (well, at least for A Christmas Carol and The Signalman). This gives the production a somewhat predictable quality, though not entirety in a negative way: these tropes are classics for a reason, and the cast are good-storytellers, their voices being vi...

Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier – Cre8 Theatre

27Jun

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier – Cre8 Theatre

Twisted is a retelling of Disney's Aladdin from the point of view of that cartoon's villain, Jafar (Fionn Cameron/Oliver Payn on alternating nights), portrayed here as a well-meaning public servant struggling to deal with his tragic backstory with Sherrazade (Cosette Bolt), and to fix the Magic Kingdom's (an amalgamation of Disney and Agrabah) issues, including its incompetent Sultan (Mitch Gardiner), immature princess (Mhairi Goodwin/Heather Richardson), criminal dude-bro Aladdin (Calum Philp/Orla Bayne) and belligerent neighbour Prince Achmed (Darren Walls). Unsurprisingly, much of the comedy is built around the Disney version of the tale. Quotes from song lyrics from the original film are peppered throughout the dialogue, scenes from the cartoon are comedically described to have happ...

Scottish Opera: La traviata – Festival Theatre

8Jun

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Scottish Opera: La traviata – Festival Theatre

It is an under-reported fact that the 2001 Baz Luhrman jukebox musical Moulin Rouge is an adaptation of 1853 Verdi opera La Traviata, itself an adaptation of the 1848 novel La Dame aux Camelias, the most famous (and autobiographical) work of Alexandre Dumas Fils (son of the more well-known creator of the Three Musketeers). All three works take place in Paris and, in all three, a famous courtesan (here Hye-Youn Lee as Violetta Valery) with consumption falls in love with an idealistic young man (here Ji-Min Park as Alfredo Germont) with a disapproving father (Giorgio Germont as Phillip Rhodes). She then forsakes all others until convinced to leave him by a father figure, which she does reluctantly with a lie, for an aristocrat (either a Count, a duke, or here Baron Douphol, played by Nichola...

22May

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Dead Girls Rising – Traverse Theatre

The play opens in media res in a dark forest. At a pivotal moment in their lives, Katie (Helen Reuben) and Hannah (Angelina Chudi) accidentally summon The Furies Tisiphone (Izzy Neish), Magaera (Zoe West) and Alecto (Rebecca Levy), the Greek goddesses of justice. A life-time's obsession with murder (one in particular, literally close to home) has brought with it consequences and the two young women might need help. We follow them through a series of moments from childhood to adulthood, themed by reasons women and girls learn to fear men (here played by the cast in masks and androgynous/Michael Myers boiler suits) and linked with Riot Grrl-inspired punk songs written by Anya Pearson and performed by the Furies (plus drummer). At the start, the audience might get a bit caught in the middl...

23Mar

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Don’t. Make. Tea. – Traverse Theatre

In a near future in which government attitudes to disability have supposedly been revolutionised, Chris (Gillian Dean), a former police detective now facing a deteriorating condition, receives a visit from Ralph (Neil John Gibson) to “check” whether she is indeed entitled to benefits. But their competing agendas are clearly mutually exclusive: if displays and white lies are not enough, then how far must Chris go to get what she needs? A dark comedy written by Rob Drummond and directed by Robert Softley Gale, Don't. Make. Tea. tackles many of the issues of current attitudes towards disability. As with many stories set in the future, the applicability is clearly in the here and now rather than the impossible. Many of Ralph's slogans, repetitions and little tricks clearly struck a chord...