REVIEWS Archives - Page 22 of 623

11Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

After Party – Traverse Theatre

Imagine inviting the family round for your 80th birthday, pouring the drinks, cutting the cake and then announcing that you intend to be dead tomorrow. That is the grenade Vivienne Blackwood throws into the celebrations in Morna Young’s After Party. A celebrated former actress, Vivienne has terminal cancer and has decided that she will determine the manner and timing of her own death. She wants her fractured family around her when she does it. You could hardly ask for a more combustible theatrical premise. What is surprising is how rarely After Party allows it to explode. This Traverse Theatre production, in association with Paines Plough and the Belgrade Theatre and directed by Katie Posner, initially treats the gathering remarkably broadly. The first half freq...

Safety – Daisy at Underbelly, Bristo Square

11Aug

By Ross MackieNo Comments

Scotland

Safety – Daisy at Underbelly, Bristo Square

Safety, the debut production from new Scottish theatre company Light Mends Carefully, is a darkly comic and quietly unnerving solo play about care, control and the stories we choose to believe. Written by Michael Reid, it follows Adam, a psychotherapist whose concern for a former client, Bill , draws him back into a relationship that should have remained firmly in the past. What begins as professional compassion gradually curdles into something far more complicated, as boundaries blur and power shifts in ways both subtle and alarming. Reid’s premise is immediately gripping because it resists easy moral certainty. Adam is not presented as a simple villain, nor as an uncomplicated victim of circumstance. Instead, Safety asks the audience to sit inside his version of events and notice,...

Murder on the Allotment: The Musical – The Cockpit

11Aug

By Alan Stuart MalinNo Comments

London

Murder on the Allotment: The Musical – The Cockpit

‘Murder on the Allotment: The Musical’ arrives at Camden Fringe with an intriguing premise and worthwhile intentions, but unfortunately the resulting production falls considerably short of its ambitions. Elizabeth Wood’s story centres on Karwan, a 17-year-old asylum seeker who finds himself navigating the prejudices and petty territorial disputes of a provincial allotment. There is undoubtedly fertile planting ground here for satire, particularly around immigration, xenophobia and attitudes towards belonging. Yet despite positioning itself as funny and provocative, the production rarely achieves either. The principal problem is the score by Elizabeth Wood, Tess Adèle Glinert and Scarlet Billham. A mammoth eleven original songs are packed into an hour, yet few feel sufficiently devel...

10Aug

By Stewart Who?No Comments

London

Can You See Me? – Museum of Comedy

I got a U (ungraded) for ‘O’ Level Physics and failed my Maths four times. My attempts to defeat these numerical frailties via exams, evening classes and persistent application continued into my early twenties. For decades, I believed that STEM subjects were my Achilles heel and leaned into the Humanities with avant garde enthusiasm. In retrospect, this mix of avoidance and failure was fuelled by uninspiring teachers and shame-based anxiety. My life could have taken a different turn entirely if my early education had been blessed with a teacher like Vivien Puppa Kocsis. Can You See Me? is a pop-science seminar which serves as a cool mix of entertainment and education. Is it a stretch to define such an event as ‘theatre’? Probably. However, this show was staged as part of the Camden ...

The Show That Goes Backwards – Camden Comedy Club

10Aug

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

London

The Show That Goes Backwards – Camden Comedy Club

The premise of the improv show is that it begins at the end, and the improvisers must build a back story for what happens in a reverse timeline (if you know what I mean). To begin the show the company ask the audience for a word, any word. Someone suggests beans – and we’re off! The play ended with a bean induced slippage in aisle seven, but the improvisers must now create their story. Sainsburys is the supermarket of choice, and the couple who were shopping in the store were rather heavy handedly admonished by security. We then move on to a rather murky discussion by executives about a merger of all supermarkets, yes, they are going to include the Co-op. This will lead to total domination of the supermarket sector and unchallenged pricing. ...

The Comedy About Spies – Adelphi Theatre

10Aug

By Alan Stuart MalinNo Comments

London

The Comedy About Spies – Adelphi Theatre

There are productions that make you smile, productions that make you laugh, and then there are those rare productions when “surrender” is the only option. ‘The Comedy About Spies’ belongs firmly in the latter category. Mischief Comedy’s latest theatrical assault on the funny bone is riotously entertaining, breathtakingly well executed and, quite simply, one of the funniest shows I have seen in a very long time. Written by Henry Lewis and Henry Shields, the play takes the familiar world of the 1960s espionage thriller and gleefully scrambles it into an ingenious comic farce. In London’s Piccadilly Hotel, spies from opposing sides (CIA and KGB) converge in pursuit of stolen top-secret documents called Project Midnight, plans for a deadly new weapon. Throw an actor aspiring to play Jam...

Mrs Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library – Traverse Theatre

10Aug

By Tom ScottNo Comments

Scotland

Mrs Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library – Traverse Theatre

The cell door opens, and a terrified woman is bundled into a dingy, dimly lit basement. A uniformed police officer aggressively tells her to give him her handbag and empties its contents on a table. He orders her to take off her coat and raise her arms, then frisks her. The interrogation starts. This is the dramatic start to ‘Mrs Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library’, Jenny Lyn Bader’s fascinating play which recently had its premiere Off-Broadway in New York and is now being seen for the first time in Europe in the Traverse’s studio theatre. The play is inspired by the real-life experience of Hannah Arendt, the political theorist and philosopher, who was briefly imprisoned by the Nazis. It is 1933. The previous year the Nazis had become the largest party in the Reichstag, and ...

10Aug

By Ella BeckleyNo Comments

Scotland

Vidrado – Central at Assembly Roxy

Vidrado takes its audience on a wholesome journey across imaginative lands filled with wonder and joyous celebration, a perfect show for the family to enjoy. It’s silly and outrageous all at once, honouring the circus tradition to find fun in the simplest of things. Renowned for his acrobatic balancing acts, Sao Paolo artist Guilherme Torres brings Vidrado to Edinburgh Fringe 2026 for its UK Premiere. Torres plays a travelling man determined to climb a mountain, assisted by a quaint embroidered map and an imaginative array of balancing props including glass bottles and of course, unicycles. Torres plays the fool, he is clumsy and maybe...

10Aug

By Danielle FarrowNo Comments

Scotland

Bog Witch – Traverse Theatre

A few branches and linen-looking sheets, fresh air and husbandry, home produce and homemade felt. How simple! Here’s permaculture, with a touch of children’s story narration, a one-eyed cat and some fine song and dance, all amid the beautiful changing seasons. How sweet! NOT when it is Bryony Kimmings’ take on the reality of uprooting for love, being a mackerel out of water, having a huge personal hole to fill, and a bog calling you to surrender to the witch. Bryony Kimmings’ exploration of life and climate changes makes the sweet saucy and the simple complex. Bog Witch - showing Kimmings’ own reluctant move to the country - is fantastically full of cynical city-slick humour, hilarious and highly adept physicality and wit, and strange rural practices. The unexpected is peppered w...

Samantha Day (I’ve Started So I’ll Finish) – Edinburgh Banshee Labyrinth

10Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Samantha Day (I’ve Started So I’ll Finish) – Edinburgh Banshee Labyrinth

Self-styled Heritage Hottie, self-confessed Recovering Accountant sits in a quiet, dark corner of (Scotland’s most haunted pub/venue – tell us another!) The Banshee Labyrinth and at least we know we’re in the right queue. Thirty minutes later we’re in the company of someone hilariously dark but nowhere near quiet. It’s an intimate venue, the Cinema Room, and proximity to a performer such as Day provokes the odd spot of discomfort, related anatomical details notwithstanding. But it’s so worth it. Reminiscences about ‘Dating Direct’ (was a thing in the late noughties, apparently), lies and false photos posted, one’s inability with age to suppress comments about others, self-effacing admissions regarding youth (‘I was like Harrods, everyone was queuing to get in’) pepper an hour where the tim...