REVIEWS Archives - Page 13 of 629

Mary Mac – Hail Mary: The Tartan Songstress – Assembly George Square

24Aug

By Torya HughesNo Comments

Scotland

Mary Mac – Hail Mary: The Tartan Songstress – Assembly George Square

Scotland’s very own drag superstar, Mary Mac, makes her debut at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Blending gentle comedy and song, this is a fun hour with a home-grown talent. Born and raised in Glasgow, Mary Mac takes her drag name from her mother. Originally trained as a musical theatre performer, she has now been doing drag for the past 16yrs, and her experience shows in her stage presence and confidence. She normally spends a lot of her time on cruise ships and peppers the evening with stories of life on board. Her CV is impressive – taking on roles in La Cage Aux Follies and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, as well as supporting Bianca Del Rio and appearing in panto. This musical theatre experience is evident in her vocal talents. There’s a very funny Cher impression, ...

24Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Kirsty Mann: Corpse – Summerhall

Summerhall's Red Lecture Theatre is a particularly appropriate home for Corpse. I always find it a slightly creepy, intimate space, but graced with comfortable, nicely raked seating that focuses attention firmly on the stage. There is something about the slightly institutional atmosphere of this particular lecture theatre that feels rather well suited to the ghost story that is about to unfold. And Corpse begins with a premise almost too good to resist. Kirsty Mann is a real-life doctor, a rational, scientifically minded woman who, with her husband Mark, buys a surprisingly cheap house in an area of London where they had never expected to be able to afford one. Immediately, alarm bells ring. Why so cheap? Then strange things start happening. Even the purchase it...

Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett – Underbelly’s Circus Hub

24Aug

By Torya HughesNo Comments

Scotland

Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett – Underbelly’s Circus Hub

International cabaret star Bernie Dieter returns to the Fringe with her spectacular line up of performers. Prepare for full frontal nudity, bodily fluids and death-defying stunts, all wrapped in sequins and served with a shot of pizazz. Club Kabarett is a show which begins from the moment you enter the tent. Impossibly glamorous performers strut amongst the audience, handing out flags labelled “slut” or “freak”, whilst certain members of the crowd are clearly rethinking their front row seating choices. However, when Bernie herself bursts onto the stage clad in head-to-toe sequins, she quickly makes it clear that no one is safe. This a cabaret which encourages interaction, some of it deeply touching. Bernie expertly shifts the mood from comedy to pathos, asking us to hold the hand of a s...

Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge – Pleasance Courtyard

24Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge – Pleasance Courtyard

Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge arrived with considerable expectation, and for a while I thought I was in for something rather special. The opening Hitchcock-esque passages are beautifully conceived, Lyons creating something strange, textured and nuanced, with an unsettling film-noir quality that suggested an intriguing hour ahead. Unfortunately, for me, the show gradually lost its way. The Beyond at Pleasance Courtyard doesn't necessarily help. It is a particularly wide room, requiring Lyons to cover considerable ground to maintain contact with the whole audience. She certainly works hard physically, but looking around during some of the longer passages, I saw rather a lot of people not laughing. Instead, there were quizzical faces, apparently trying, as I was, to piece ...

24Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Buggers – Pleasance Courtyard

Francis Bacon distorted the human figure on canvas. Buggers asks what happened when that same capacity for distortion entered one of the most important relationships of his life. Written by Alistair Hall and directed by Alice Wordsworth, the play immediately demythologises the famous story that Bacon first encountered George Dyer burgling his home, giving us instead an almost wordless wine-bar tryst between Alistair Hall’s Francis Bacon and Peter Clements’ George Dyer. The following morning begins to expose the gulf between them. “I like your nose,” says Bacon. “Yeah, it’s been punched a lot,” replies Dyer. When Bacon discovers that Dyer has done time, he is delighted. “How wonderful.” Then comes a line which encapsulates both Bacon’s attraction to Dyer and something fu...

24Aug

By Danielle FarrowNo Comments

Scotland

EXXY – King’s Theatre

It’s quite something when the safety feature at the start of a show is for the audience’s health rather than the performers, and EXXY from Dan Daw Creative Projects continues to be quite something throughout this highly physically accessible production, with its built in text and sign language throughout, as well as being set up as a relaxed performance, with warning cues for more extreme lighting and sound. EXXY is labelled dance-theatre. It seems more heavily theatre, but with that dance quality which places the work of understanding movement onto the audience itself. Spoken word aspects (live and recorded), along with text and images projected onto the corrugated back wall, and strong soundscapes, all provide context - including Daws’ nan’s backyard and hospital settings - in which h...

24Aug

By Alan Stuart MalinNo Comments

London

Mates – The Courtyard Theatre

Four Face Theatre’s ‘Mates’ begins with an appealing comic problem: four friends, based on a misplaced promise, have secured the resources and financial backing to stage a new production but have yet to decide what that production should be. Each arrives with different artistic ambitions, and their attempts to develop a coherent piece soon become a contest between personalities, insecurities and conflicting definitions of meaningful theatre. This framework gives the company considerable room for invention, and the action repeatedly shifts into imagined productions proposed by the characters, enabling the show to experiment with contrasting genres and performance styles. Within this theatrical patchwork are amusing observations about masculinity, social privilege, conspiracy culture ...

24Aug

By Alan Stuart MalinNo Comments

London

Maz Pantz – Canal Café Theatre

Created and performed by Mary Redmond, ‘Maz Pantz’ arrives at the Camden Fringe with considerable confidence, promising a character-led sketch show combining physical comedy, mime, cinematic voice-over and cleverly constructed material. Unfortunately, the performance itself falls some considerable distance short of that promise. Across approximately 45 minutes, Redmond introduces an assortment of eccentric characters through a succession of sketches, some of whom return throughout the show. There is certainly imagination behind the concept, and Redmond commits enthusiastically to each creation, employing physicality, recorded sound and exaggerated characterisation to distinguish between them. On paper, this should be a fun show, however the difficulty is that the comedy rarely la...

Shake It Up! The Improvised Shakespeare Show – Gilded Balloon Teviot

24Aug

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

Scotland

Shake It Up! The Improvised Shakespeare Show – Gilded Balloon Teviot

Welcome to the world of improvised Shakespeare! I have seen Shake It Up! several times before, including in the Birmingham Library with the wonderful The School of Night, so I was well versed in their technique. Before they can begin, they ask the audience for suggestions of a comedy, tragedy, or history play. With a vote dependent upon our clap energy, we enthusiastically voted for a history play. To build more detail, we needed a protagonist, someone that you know but whom is not in the audience with you. Hurray! Pietro in the front row suggests Ludovico his flat-mate, and his bad habits are chewing loudly, being messy, and generally rude, but good hearted. The play will be set in the Lake District with the gorgeous rolling hills, and Kendal Mint Cake...

Boogie on the Bones – Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall

24Aug

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

Scotland

Boogie on the Bones – Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall

Within Theatre Company is an award-winning company, brought together from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine by the reality of their situation of being displaced and working in London. As an ensemble, they create work that shares their belief in freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and using art to resist oppression and totalitarianism. It is therefore, fitting that they have chosen to write about an era in the history of the Soviet Union following the death of Stalin, when a section of the young Soviet community chose to rebel against the grey nature of their existence, in 1955 Moscow. This underground counterculture movement called themselves the Stilyagi (style hunters), they wanted to love a more colourful life with jazz music, dancing, and to express their passions wi...