Scotland Archives - Page 9 of 154

Lorna Rose Treen: Now that’s What I Call Characters – Pleasance Courtyard

18Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Lorna Rose Treen: Now that’s What I Call Characters – Pleasance Courtyard

I have reviewed Lorna Rose Treen a few times over the years, through Skin Pigeon and 24 Hour Diner People, so Now That’s What I Call Characters presents something of a dilemma. This is essentially Treen’s greatest hits album, and I already own most of the records. All the favourites are here. The man with guns for hands, the extraordinarily long-armed trucker, the spy and femme fatale, and the Girl Guide proudly displaying the special badge she earned for killing Bin Laden, her terrorist assassination badge, naturally. I particularly enjoy the girl with braces, who keeps popping up throughout the evening. Treen herself remains immensely likeable. Her comedy has always had a bumbling, stumbling quality. Lines occasionally trip over themselves, characters threat...

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream – Pleasance at EICC

18Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream – Pleasance at EICC

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream is certainly different. As I approach the 50-show mark at this year’s Fringe, I have seen nothing quite like this unusual, wordless proposition from Plexus Polaire. It is highly visual theatre, driven by a tremendous score of evocative, purposeful music that carries you along. But does it ultimately carry you anywhere? That is perhaps the difficulty with wordless theatre. Getting from A to B while signalling precisely what is happening along the way requires absolute visual clarity. At its best, Lucy’s Dream is mesmerising, hypnotic and genuinely dreamlike, with human performers and puppets inhabiting an increasingly uncertain world. At other times, it becomes repetitive. There is, it has to be said, quite a lot of Lucy lying on a bed. The ...

The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth – Pleasance Queen Dome

18Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth – Pleasance Queen Dome

The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth sounds like the sort of title somebody might invent at two in the morning during the Fringe. Instead, this new musical from writers Alex Moneypenny and Adam Tuffrey is a remarkably smart, accomplished proposition that may have considerably further to travel. First, a word about the room. The Queen Dome at Pleasance Dome is a beautiful little theatre, nicely proportioned and with really no bad seats. Its onboard lighting and sound kit is among the best I have encountered at the Fringe, and certainly the sound here, in my experience, is never bad and frequently excellent. For a change I sat in the front row, and on this occasion that was probably a mistake. Much of the action spills into the wings and around the front of the audience, meanin...

On Some Far Shore – Greenside George Street

18Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

On Some Far Shore – Greenside George Street

Sometimes the architecture tells you almost as much about a Fringe show as the programme. On Some Far Shore plays in a tiny space, perhaps 40 square metres, with audience on two sides and a playing area barely three metres by three in one corner. This is theatre in your front room, exposing for the performers and with absolutely nowhere to hide. Written by Louis Benneyworth, with book by Benneyworth and Madi Bouchta, this new musical follows Euan, played by Thomas Perry, struggling to write the eulogy for his mother Helen, Nicole Palka, while his girlfriend Isla, Francesca Knoop, attempts to help. It is a piece about grief, memory, storytelling and the people we leave behind. The three performances are strong, vocally and emotionally, but On Some Far Shore nee...

A Ghost Among the Living – Queen Dome at Pleasance Dome

18Aug

By Beth EltringhamNo Comments

Scotland

A Ghost Among the Living – Queen Dome at Pleasance Dome

Box Tale Soup are back at it again with another spine-tingling creation. A Ghost Among the Living takes us into the dark and timeless tales of Edgar Allan Poe, exploring themes of horror, murder and consumption. With a cast of two well synchronized performers, this is a masterclass in visual theatre and never scrimps on the finer details. Set within the Pleasance Queen Dome, our actors have very few places to hide on this round thrust stage, however with every movement choreographed and thoughtfully directed, neither performer drops their compelling performance for even a second. A moving set is constructed out of boxes and arches, all hand made by the company and all multifunctional. The cast effectively use their set to transport us to labyrinth like catacombs, lavish parties and ...

17Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Stamptown – Assembly George Square

Ten years at the Edinburgh Fringe makes Stamptown something of an institution. The problem, perhaps, is that alternative comedy is supposed to kick against institutions, not become one. This particular institution has, sadly, aged like milk. Created and hosted by Zach Zucker, Stamptown has built its reputation on chaos, unpredictability and giving unconventional performers a platform. Here, however, Zucker seemed remarkably reluctant to surrender that platform to anybody else. He was onstage for an extraordinary amount of the evening. At some point, you rather wished he would move over and let the acts on. Unfortunately, when they arrived, they weren't particularly strong either. The notable exception was aerialist Donna Carnow, unquestionably the highlight of the...

The Legend of Queen – Surgeons’ Hall Grand Theatre

17Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Legend of Queen – Surgeons’ Hall Grand Theatre

There are some voices you simply cannot mistake. Peter Marchant gets remarkably close to one of them. Close your eyes during The Legend of Queen and you are pretty much there. Open them and you are definitely not. But that is rather the point. This is not a Freddie Mercury impersonation act, it is an exceptionally accomplished celebration of the music. Marchant particularly captures the compressed, slightly shredded quality of Mercury’s lower register. It is instantly identifiable and extremely well done. At the very top, he cannot quite reach those extraordinary Mercury heights, but two very able backing singers take the sound onwards and upwards. It is clever arranging around a voice that was always going to be almost impossible to reproduce. Musicianship throughout is up ...

Jess Fuchs: Feral – Pleasance Bunker Two

17Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Jess Fuchs: Feral – Pleasance Bunker Two

There is a particular Gen Z manipulation of language that I am encountering increasingly at this Fringe. Words are compressed, acronyms appear without explanation and everything is delivered at such speed that, unless you are completely tuned into the vocabulary, the joke can be halfway across Edinburgh before you have worked out where it started. Jess Fuchs's Feral occasionally suffers from this. At one point she references being a “STEM woman”. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, apparently. Perhaps everybody else knew. I didn't. Sometimes Fuchs is simply a little too clever for her own good, or perhaps too determined to demonstrate how clever the language can be. Which is a shame, because when she allows herself room to breathe, Fuchs is very funny inde...

Rosie Jones: I Can’t Tell What She’s Saying – Pleasance Cabaret Bar

17Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Rosie Jones: I Can’t Tell What She’s Saying – Pleasance Cabaret Bar

Rosie Jones has the sort of characteristics that, in considerably darker times, would have put her first in line for persecution: female, disabled and gay. Today, she jokes, they put her at the front of the queue for arts funding. Swings and roundabouts, eh! Two things she definitely can't handle! And that is pretty much the territory of I Can’t Tell What She’s Saying, an hour in which Jones gleefully crashes through almost every boundary between able-bodied and disabled comedy. At one point she confesses that she is only kidding about being disabled. She has been pretending all along, perfecting her iconically slow speech and unstable delivery. She only did it for the money. It is wonderfully outrageous because Jones understands precisely where the boundaries are and then t...

17Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Endgame – Pleasance at EICC

Probably Samuel Beckett's second most famous work after Waiting For Godot, Endgame is, perhaps not coincidentally, a much bleaker play than the one famously known as the play in which nothing happens (and twice). The play's mix of the absurd and the nihilistic are not for everyone. This material is not relatable or made of easily defined punchlines, and anyone coming in purely off the name of a famous comedy writer or the MCU team-up could be in for a shock. Set in a houser in a post-apocalyptic landscape, the play follows Hamm (director Henry Maynard), his servant Clov (Simon Gleave) and Hamm's two dustbin-bound parents, Nagg (Derek Elwood) and Nell (Annabel Arden). Maynard brings a Shakespearan gravitas to the seat-bound and petty Hamm, while Elwood and Arden in their bins a...