REVIEWS Archives - Page 27 of 406

Me For You – Pleasance Courtyard (The Green)

10Aug

By Tom ScottNo Comments

Scotland

Me For You – Pleasance Courtyard (The Green)

‘Me for You’ is a fascinating play about two women who are in love. It has a sparkling, very funny script and is beautifully performed. The climate emergency provides an intriguing backdrop to this contemporary drama. Holly has been seeing Jake for quite some time. Now they want to have a child together. But Jake comes to regret the day he introduces Holly to his friend and workmate, Alex. The two women quickly fall in love. For a while Holly continues to sleep with Jake but, as she’s also having an affair with Alex, she stops taking the pill. Holly finally tells Jake the truth. Understandably he’s very upset. And Holly’s assurance that “It’s you, not me” and that she still cares about him, doesn’t really help Jake to feel any better. Two people had loved each other. But the r...

An Asian Queer Story: Coming Out to Dead People – Assembly Roxy

10Aug

By Wendy McEwanNo Comments

Scotland

An Asian Queer Story: Coming Out to Dead People – Assembly Roxy

Ricky Sim is a gifted storyteller. He talks beautifully about the complexities of coming out as gay to his Malaysian family, and his grief following the death of his beloved mother. He also tells a lot of dick jokes. Sim engages energetically with the crowd as he introduces us to the intricacies of “Gaysian” culture and the accompanying slang. Do you know why Sim decided not to major in computer science? Go to his show and you will find out. Just when Sim was preparing to come out to his mom, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was afraid that he might break her heart. He wished that there was a gay Asian role model he could point to, so that she would know he could be happy. Sim fills our hearts with memories and little details about his mother. Years after her passing, w...

Jake Donaldson: Spectacle – Mash House, Just the Attic

10Aug

By Ben PearsonNo Comments

Scotland

Jake Donaldson: Spectacle – Mash House, Just the Attic

Jake Donaldson delivers a hilarious hour of entertaining and at times informative comedy in his stand-up show Spectacle. Donaldson is partially sighted, meaning he sees things, in his words, ‘like a memory’. He has a picture, but it’s blurry round the edges. Donaldson uses his disability as a starting point for some truly brilliant humour. Most notably, there’s an ‘audio description’ recording that plays on and off throughout the show. Beginning as a simple description of Donaldson’s movements around the venue, the ‘voice’ soon goes off-piste, insulting both his appearance and his routine. I don’t want to give anything away, but the audio description even allows for a closing twist that made several members of the audience gasp (myself included). I had an enormous grin on my face...

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...

Failure Project – Summerhall, Anatomy Lecture Theatre

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Failure Project – Summerhall, Anatomy Lecture Theatre

A new play by BAFTA nominee Yolanda Mercy (Quarter Life Crisis), in which Mercy plays Ade Adeyami, a young British-Nigerian playwright and actor who is still riding the wave of her first play, which has become an unexpected Fringe hit. With this success, and the realisation that she might even be able to make a living from her dream, comes an unexpected problem - a hierarchy of editors, agents and publicists who are there to help, nay manipulate, her. Ade’s second play, Day Girl, about a working-class black kid at a private school, has been commissioned, and paid for, and Ade finds she must now dance to her new masters’ tune. Before she knows it a B-list, minor celebrity influencer with no acting experience is cast in the lead instead of Ade, worst still she want to be ‘collabora...

Sleeping With The Yemeni: Mike Eshaq – Just The Tonic Legends

10Aug

By Wendy McEwanNo Comments

Scotland

Sleeping With The Yemeni: Mike Eshaq – Just The Tonic Legends

Mike Eshaq is an American Muslim on Yemeni descent, who has served in the US marines and loves bacon. In other words, he has plenty to talk about. He comes from Detroit, which used to be America’s murder capital. But the city has been colonised by hipsters and now, even Eshaq’s old friends use words like “delectable”. It is Eshaq’s first time in Scotland, and apparently we are hard to understand. In particular, Eshaq’s GPS does not like the Old Town. “Have you ever found a show.. and then found that you were above the show?” That’s my pet peeve about Edinburgh (my home city) too! Eshaq travels extensively, doing shows in all sorts of exotic locations - but the weirdest is Oklahoma. He is keen to learn about Scotland and what makes us tick. One joke falls flat due to the cultural ...

June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music and Me – Summerhall, Dissection Room

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music and Me – Summerhall, Dissection Room

Performed cabaret style with tables and chairs, it’s well worth arriving a little before the stated ticket start time, with drinks in hand, to snag the best viewpoint. Early birds also get the significant bonus of a personal welcome from writer/performer Charlene Boyd, sashaying between tables humming tunes and chatting in American drawl like a hospitable Texas mam. Boyd has come a long way from the seeds of an idea, germinated during the lockdown-years, recently divorced mum of two, in her very unglamorous Glasgow high-rise! As the hamster wheel stopped for many of us, Boyd showed that it’s amazing what you can achieve when you have time on your hands! But Boyd always knew she was better placed than almost anyone to write the story of June Carter, having sung for the last 14 yea...

Maria Telnikoff: All The Men Are Going To Hate Me — Underbelly, Bristo Square

10Aug

By Olivia CoxNo Comments

Scotland

Maria Telnikoff: All The Men Are Going To Hate Me — Underbelly, Bristo Square

As soon as Maria Telnikoff bursts onto the Buttercup stage at Underbelly Bristo Square in a frenetic, gyrating dance to Charli xcx’s ‘Guess’, she totally commands the space with her charisma and physical comedy skills. It’s an energetic start, and she maintains this electric energy throughout her 60-minute show All The Men Are Going To Hate Me. After she’s got that dance out of her system, Telnikoff introduces us to the concept of the show: she wants to write the next great work of literature — about all the men she’s slept with. It’s a simple but clever framework that allows her to break up and act out each of these stories as individual ‘chapters’, which she punctuates with a series of placards. As she takes us through the journey of her sexual history, we’re introduced t...

10Aug

By Jessie MartinNo Comments

Scotland

Birdwatching – The Space @ Venue 45

Black Bright Theatre has hit it out of the park once again with their latest fringe production. The company is no stranger to the horror genre – a notoriously difficult style to actualise on stage. However, Black Bright Theatre always manages to hit the nail on the head – this time with a meta twist. Conceptually so well considered - what seems to be a classic coming of age story, becomes a fourth-wall-breaking, psychologically-thrilling powerhouse. The three actors (Ellen Trevaskiss, Maddie Farnhill, and Mimi Millmore) were exceptional – uniting a playful naturality, and a harrowed, tormented feel into their performances. Their ability to cut through to an audience in such a striking way, both comedically and dramatically, has for me, been unmatched at...