Scotland Archives - Page 16 of 154

11Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Singer – Traverse Theatre

There is a lovely irony running through The Singer. This is a show fascinated by the importance of finding the flow in music, yet it is a production which repeatedly struggles to find its own. Perhaps that is entirely intentional. Life is messy. Creativity is messy. Relationships are certainly messy, and the relationship between Joe, a profoundly Deaf songwriter, and Andy, a musician whose own career has fallen apart, was never going to travel in a conveniently straight line. So perhaps the stops, starts and sudden changes of direction are part of Cora Bissett's design. But that raises another question. Is the mess what an audience actually wants, or do we still crave the simplicity of a story which knows where it is taking us? There is an enormous amount to admire here. J...

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,...

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...

Ian Stone (The Plebs Pow Wow) – Edinburgh Counting House

10Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Ian Stone (The Plebs Pow Wow) – Edinburgh Counting House

And if you do end up with a Rhino-sized hamster in your kitchen, make damn sure it has its trousers in order and understands the recommended toilet manoeuvres. You get meh? ‘Mon there, keep up. Especially Keith from Canada. There’s audience sympathy for Keith, for so quick and break-neck is the pace of this show, it’s a tall ask. Speaking of which, just take a moment to contemplate the diminutive Hazel Blears given the responsibility for floods back in 2007? Speaking of politicians, there’s a brief assessment of prime ministers from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown et al up to and including Andy Burnham. It’s exhausting, impossible to take your eyes off him or take even a second to pass comment to your neighbour. There are twists and turns, but Stone doesn’t slow down for any of them. It’s ...

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Cathy – Traverse Theatre

Tommy never appears, we don't see him alive, in flashback or even in a photograph. Yet by the end of Eilidh Loan's beautifully observed new play, I felt I knew him. That is quite some trick. Tommy is dead before the story begins, leaving Cathy to negotiate that peculiar new country called widowhood. Elaine C. Smith, making a heroic return to the Traverse stage after 26 years, gives us a woman whose stoicism is matched only by her capacity to find humour in the darkness. And Cathy is surprisingly, wonderfully funny. Not polite theatrical chuckling, but genuine laugh out loud funny. Loan understands something fundamental about grief and perhaps about Scottish families: sometimes you laugh because the alternative is crying. During this performance, plenty of people did both. T...

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Waiting For Wonka – Gilded Balloon

Fifteen years after Willy Wonka opened the gates of his chocolate factory, health and safety has finally caught up with him. And frankly, it has questions. Why, for example, was there no handrail beside the chocolate river? Had there been one, perhaps Augustus Gloop would never have fallen in. And what about Veruca Salt's father, who followed his daughter down the rubbish chute trying to save her? We now discover that he actually died in the furnace. Welcome to Waiting for Wonka, Half Trick Theatre's very funny reimagining of what became of Wonka's unfortunate young visitors once childhood was over and the lawyers, trauma and demands for corporate responsibility arrived. It is a terrific concept and frequently laugh out loud funny. Veruca, Augustus, Violet and Mike are ad...