Edinburgh Festival Theatre Archives

Assembly Hall – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

23Aug

By Kathleen MansfieldNo Comments

Scotland

Assembly Hall – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Assembly Hall by the Kidd Pivot company is curiously absorbing. Depicting an AGM of a historical reenactment group, this piece marries quick-fire dialogue, precision dance, a great sound design (Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe), mime and terrific ensemble work. This ailing reenactment troupe in love with paying homage to chivalric romance takes us on a journey inside the minds of its members, with their dreams, fantasies and illicit affairs. The cartoonish mannerisms that illustrate the dialogue are exaggerated and aptly fit the battling excesses of a living history group. The compulsion to create long-lost hand-to-hand battle with clanking armor and heavy swords is intoxicating, indeed - almost an addiction which is hard to give up. Reenactment groups avidly research and ma...

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

18May

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Edinburgh’s longest running Musical theatre company, Southern Light Opera shine extra bright for this no-expenses-spared phantasmagorical production of the stage version of the much-loved 1969 MGM musical film. With one of the best special effects, I have ever seen on stage, this is one show you do not want to miss! The original film and subsequent stage adaptation is loosely based on the children’s novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car by Ian Fleming (better known as the creator of James Bond) from 1964 and adapted for the silver screen by Roald Dahl. The story follows recently widowed inventor Caractacus Potts and his two children and their love of an old ex-champion racing car, threatened with the scrap heap, but brought back to life (and then some!) by Potts. Chitty take...

The Shawshank Redemption – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

25Apr

By Kathleen MansfieldNo Comments

Scotland

The Shawshank Redemption – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Ben Onwuke, playing Ellis ‘Red’ Redding, carries this story beautifully. He tops and tails it with a mellow voice and a story-telling style to captivate. No wonder he has numerous audio books to his credit. However, the first half is a bombardment of aggression with little remission. No doubt, prison is like that, yet, undoubtedly, there is plenty of subtle menace and understated tension simmering. A mood of depression must prevail in some corners - hence the high rate of suicide. Here we find a storm of high-pitched savagery. As a result, the director (David Esbjornson) offers the cast little scope to build tension and create climactic power. A little more ebb and flow, a smidgen of the off button in the volume would help build and release tension. Even in the supposed searing heat,...

Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

12Apr

By Kathleen MansfieldNo Comments

Scotland

Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

IMHO the fairy tale tradition meets tattoos meets masks meets humour meets intense physical creativity meets time … is a feast. Matthew Bourne’s recreation of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty is all his Gothic own and yet not. The man himself credits the original dancers with contributing to the exquisite storytelling and, there is no doubt, his long-term collaboration with designer Lez Brotherston is a winning combination. It is a beautiful creation of light and dark. The performers clearly love what they do and their passion bleeds into the auditorium and captures your body and soul. Bourne cares about every detail and he inspires equal attentiveness in his cast and crew. The result is a deeply, deeply satisfying and uplifting narrative. A radical vampiric element is stirred into vari...

An Inspector Calls – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

1Feb

By Beth EltringhamNo Comments

Scotland

An Inspector Calls – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

An upper class family oblivious to fact that the world around them is falling to ruin, a family laughing around a dinner table without a care in the world; that is until he arrives. A detective. A dead girl and secrets to be explored. There’s a reason that An Inspector calls by J B Priestley has been wildly used in educational studies throughout the years and that’s simply because it fantastic. It’s a play that keeps us on our toes as it unravels itself with every character, providing us with twists and turns but also striving in the end to leave us with important moral lessons. The lessons of this tale clearly being ‘our own actions have consequences’ and that ‘we should take responsibility for how we treat others because we never know what could be going on in their lives’. T...

<strong>Ainadamar – Edinburgh Festival Theatre</strong>

15Nov

By Kathleen MansfieldNo Comments

Scotland

Ainadamar – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Ainadamar (The Fountain of Tears) is a fusion of dance, visual technology, voices and orchestra, knitted together in bold, beautiful, installation-style art. The opening, a monochrome projection of a bull, is instantly intriguing and the intermittent visual representations cast to the shimmering circular curtain continue throughout the opera, lending depth and coherence not afforded by the libretto (David Henry Hwang). The curtain is easily penetrated and moved aside, suggesting power and vulnerability at one and the same time. The chainmail bullring conceals scene changes and reveals the action with the cast free to move between the interior and the exterior. This metaphor translates to traditional Andalucia and its gypsy customs of Flamenco and bullfighting, which Lorca endeavoured to...

The Cher Show: A New Musical – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

12Oct

By Beth EltringhamNo Comments

Scotland

The Cher Show: A New Musical – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

An electric, energetic and cleaver show, the Cher Show has come to Edinburgh to educate audiences on the life of musical icon Cher. The music loud and brilliantly executed, the lights bright and the costumes are absolutely dazzling. Cher has been around for what may feel like forever, an ever-constant voice through the lives of most of us living, and through the ages neither her voice, power or face has changed all that much. For such an individual voice it takes real skill to be able to impersonate and do the legend justice, the Cher Show takes the challenge of finding one skill filled actress to fill the role and multiplies it by three, separating Cher into the three main stages of her career: the naive rising star (Babe played by Millie O’Connell) , the confident woman freeing hersel...

Zog & The Flying Doctors – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

10Jul

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Zog & The Flying Doctors – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Another reliable bedtime tale from the Julia Donaldson canon, the one thing you’re sure of is rhythm and rhyme carrying the story along to its denouement with an unerring pulse. Our 9-year old gave this show 7/10, observed ‘the book was better’ declaring; ‘it shouldn’t have been like a musical’. It’s possible he was older than the target demographic, but he had a point. Fair, creating an hour of theatre from a book that takes fifteen minutes to read requires some embellishment. Colourful, bouncy and energetic it was but this felt bulked out and overloaded, the original ‘script’ lurking but ultimately submerged beneath the new music and material. Unfortunately, possibly due to an imbalance betwixt the music/mics volumes, the lively initial ‘re-cap’ of Zog’s dragon training (from the first, ...

Magic Goes Wrong – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

14Apr

By Beth EltringhamNo Comments

Scotland

Magic Goes Wrong – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Magic Goes Wrong is exactly what it says on the tin, it’s a magic show that simply goes wrong in every way imaginable. Created by Mischief Theatre famous for their West end hit ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’, Magic Goes Wrong follows its predecessors in its slapstick and childish humour which is enough to make most people belly laugh their way through the show however it comes into question if that humour gets old a little too soon. The show centres around Sophisticato (Sam Hill), a rather terrible magician attempting to put together a charity night in memory of his father and other magicians who have lost their lives in magic related accidents. He honours this by pulling together a strange and equally terrible band of magicians that his father had met in the past. The Mind Mangler (Rory Fa...

Bedknobs and Broomsticks – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

19Feb

By Melissa JonesNo Comments

Scotland

Bedknobs and Broomsticks – Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Disney first brought Bedknobs and Broomsticks to the silver screen back in 1971, starring the much-loved Angela Lansbury. With music from the legendary Sherman Brothers, it’s always quietly nestled itself amongst the firm family favourites. The announcement it was coming to the stage and its subsequent tour have sent the musical theatre world into a frenzy and it’s easy to see why. Set amongst the bombs of WWII, three orphaned children find themselves sent to the south coast as evacuees where they are taken in by Eglantine Price, a trainee witch in correspondence with the elusive Emelius Browne. She’s got a witchy idea to defeat the Nazis with an incredible spell, but she and the children need help from Professor Emelius to seal the deal. The gang of travelers soon realize that in order...