Roger Jacobs, Author at North West End UK

Anna Clifford: I See Dead(ly) People – Gilded Balloon Teviot (Balcony)

15Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Anna Clifford: I See Dead(ly) People – Gilded Balloon Teviot (Balcony)

As anyone who’s ever spent any time in Ireland knows, when something is referred to as ‘deadly’ (or ‘savage’) it generally means ‘good’. Likewise, and not altogether obvious, is that ‘brutal’ just means ‘bad’ and to illustrate it Anna uses the example of a ‘brutal’ murder; it doesn’t mean merciless, it just means whoever committed the felony made a botch of it, one of those Friday afternoon/Monday morning homicides. This is a high-octane performance from a sparky player with a huge presence and the wise-cracks persist throughout as we learn about her family, relationships and hatred of the mood music employed in waxing parlours. The show pivots around events in March 2020 (a month we’ll all probably still be talking about in fifty years’ time) as Anna returns home to see her boyfriend only...

Baxter vs The Bookies – Gilded Balloon Teviot (Wee Room)

15Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Baxter vs The Bookies – Gilded Balloon Teviot (Wee Room)

Our hero William Baxter justifies the chequered life of an inveterate gambler by bemoaning the fact he left school at fifteen with no qualifications, but proudly pointing out he’d made an ashtray in woodwork. This is just the first of many bon mots and one-liners in a one-man play adapted from Roy Granville’s book. One could be forgiven for thinking the role had been written especially for Andy Linden, an actor instantly recognizable (Harry Potter, Count Arthur Strong, to name just two from a long, long line of film and TV credits) his lugubrious face and earthy London tone enabling masterful storytelling. The play was split into five ‘episodes’ each with a twist at the end, Andy playing other parts beyond Baxter; Jeff Armstrong (a bookie so morose that ‘if he ran a funeral parlour peop...

Troy Hawke: Sigmund Troy’d – Underbelly Bristo Square

14Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Troy Hawke: Sigmund Troy’d – Underbelly Bristo Square

What would Jan Molby do? For those too young to know, Jan Molby was a Football Colossus who played for Liverpool, represented Denmark internationally (33 times), and artfully opened up opposition teams with passes defying accepted physics. All without ever moving more than a few yards from the centre-spot, pre-dating the Work-From-Home ethic. For ‘Football’, substitute ‘Comedy’ and you’ve Troy Hawke, the nattily-attired squadron heartthrob from 1930’s Biggin Hill, the chief contrast being he takes us on a voyage covering distances that would’ve given Jan digestive issues. Quite how he took us from a disgruntled online fast-food customer in Sidcup to Sigmund Freud’s exploitation of the Coca plant via Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Gucci, and an exploration of imposter syndrome is d...

Shame On You! – Summerhall Demonstration Room

14Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Shame On You! – Summerhall Demonstration Room

This is what The Fringe is about. Amongst all the comedy, cabaret, theatre and musicals you stumble upon something so strange, other-worldly and weird, almost spectacular in its conceit that it’ll work. And it does. Shame, it seems, is something no-one on the planet can entirely escape. Embarrassment likewise but as an emotion shame is likely to linger longer in one’s system. Trixa Arnold and Ilja Komarov began collating stories from all members of society in Switzerland on the topic before expanding their net to include Russia, Pakistan and The Netherlands, building up an archive of over 450 ‘stories’, some a couple of paragraphs long, others simple one-liners. In an intimate setting, in front of an audience just shy of twenty Ilja begins by simply reading some of these out, the inside...

Men With Coconuts – Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

13Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Men With Coconuts – Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

The award-winning local improv troupe returned to the Fringe to illustrate what a double-edged sword the make-it up-as-you-go-along world of improv is. At times inducing belly-laughs, at others a cringe or two and all points in between. OK then, a multi-edged sword. The former was true at the start as our three players bounded onto stage following a frantic jazz soundtrack, repeating the manoeuvre no less than three times to accommodate late-comers. In all the excitement ringmaster Charlie appeared to lose track of his microphone while piano-player Colin dutifully added appropriate incidentals to the chaos and the tone was set, snapping to attention the audience, a key element in this milieu. The guys riffed around various suggested film genres on an imaginary ‘Prime Minister versus Cou...

Zog & The Flying Doctors – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

10Jul

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Zog & The Flying Doctors – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Another reliable bedtime tale from the Julia Donaldson canon, the one thing you’re sure of is rhythm and rhyme carrying the story along to its denouement with an unerring pulse. Our 9-year old gave this show 7/10, observed ‘the book was better’ declaring; ‘it shouldn’t have been like a musical’. It’s possible he was older than the target demographic, but he had a point. Fair, creating an hour of theatre from a book that takes fifteen minutes to read requires some embellishment. Colourful, bouncy and energetic it was but this felt bulked out and overloaded, the original ‘script’ lurking but ultimately submerged beneath the new music and material. Unfortunately, possibly due to an imbalance betwixt the music/mics volumes, the lively initial ‘re-cap’ of Zog’s dragon training (from the first, ...

Laurel & Hardy – Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

9Jun

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Laurel & Hardy – Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Knowledge of our two protagonists – for those of us who had a TV back in the late 60’s/early 70’s - extended to a pair of bumbling incompetents consistently at odds with even the most mundane of situations. Funny, comic, slapstick, every grade of mirth was covered, be it driving a car or attempting some interior decoration, the wince-inducing violence happily hilarious and incidental. In our lofty 9-year-old estimation Tom & Jerry cartoons (the proper ones!) owed a huge debt to Stan and Ollie. But this production delved behind the Saturday morning entertainment, an insight into the lives of Oliver Norvell Hardy and Arthur Stanley Jefferson, successes in their own right prior to becoming the duo the globe knows so well. The austere, bleached (even the pies were bluey-grey) concrete b...

5May

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Red Ellen – Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

The author (Caroline Bird) admitted that ‘this play is one interpretation… there are so many Ellens to choose from’ and in this respect the show lost pace and momentum towards the end, lingering too long on Ellen’s disappointments, professional and personal, as she stumbled, a rattling, over-worked medicine cabinet, towards death; the air of exhaustion at the conclusion of the Second World War was captured well by the blazing row between Ellen (Bettrys Jones) and Herbert Morrison (Kevin Lennon), both true and tragic, but overlooked were her incredible feats and achievements as one of less than a handful of women involved in the government and politics of the era. Scant attention was paid to her involvement with the Women’s Suffrage organisation, hardly mentioned was her first position as M...

18Apr

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

The Meaning of Zong – Edinburgh Lyceum

This play is only part of the story. The central character Olaudah Equiano (the leading 18th century black campaigner for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade) is played by originator and author Giles Terera and at points we feel like we’re watching him, not Olaudah. It’s a play about struggle(s) and a quest for truth and Terera’s journey in writing and researching it involved both. As Bristol Old Vic’s artistic directors Tom Morris and Charlotte Geeves write in the programme, he ‘battled the British theatre establishment’ in order ‘to get it on its feet’. Having taken six years to develop, its debut performance was delayed from early 2020 by the Covid pandemic, so what we’re seeing tonight is almost brand new; the first performance was at the Bristol Old Vic on April 2, 2022, a ...

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

6Apr

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

‘But the music keeps playing And won’t let the world get me down.’ These lyrics from the title track of Carole King’s third album ‘Music’, released a mere 11 months after the legendary ‘Tapestry’ in 1971, could easily explain her life and career, neither of which were short of ups and downs. The question was, how on earth could anyone do it justice in just over two hours? The moment the lights went down from her seat at the centrally placed piano, Molly-Grace Cutler (Carole) banished any concerns. The opening lines of ‘So Far Away’ were a hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck/lump-in-the-throat moment. Her voice (whether she’d worked on it or not) was uncannily ‘Carole’, the theatre pin-drop silent. There followed an entertaining, slightly rushed account of her early years; learning the p...