Edinburgh Archives - North West End UK

Edinburgh Days – Auditorium at St Bride’s Community Centre

21Aug

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

Scotland

Edinburgh Days – Auditorium at St Bride’s Community Centre

Set in the early 1800’s, Edinburgh Days is the story of life in Edinburgh during Britain’s war with France, and focuses on life around the docks of Leith, and the shores of Portobello. Written by composer Brian Spence, he teamed up with Bob Tomson as a creative director, whom he has worked with previously, and Caroline Inglis (Director) who has worked on Edinburgh Days in a previous iteration and directed this version of the show. The beginning of the show sets the scene at the White Hart Inn, where MacGregor (Laurence Aitkin) admits that he has lusted after Jean (Jaydean Cramb), his friend Robbie’s (Michael MacDuff) partner for a long time, but she has always rejected him and stayed true to Robbie, and their son Davie (Elodie Enoch-Thorburn [young Davie], Noah Young [older Davie]...

21Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Tell Me – Summerhall Dissection Room

The Dissection Room at Summerhall is a fascinating space, double height and voluminous, and Tell Me certainly knows how to celebrate that verticality. At its centre stands a giant open metal cube. Inside that sits another, and another, a Russian doll of skeletal geometry which performers Sadiq Ali, Phoebe Knight and Jonah Russell climb through, hang from, rotate and send tumbling across its different surfaces. There is something of the rolling of dice about it too. During the AIDS crisis, whether you received that positive diagnosis could seem like the biggest roll of the dice imaginable. Tell Me moves between that crisis and our contemporary understanding of HIV. The dramaturgy is often beautifully handled. Radio announcements report the emergence of this frigh...

21Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Penelope – Underbelly Belly Button

Grace McLean's hands deserve a review of their own. In Penelope, they become almost another piece of stage machinery. A picture on a bedside table is conjured between her fingers, suddenly forming something resembling a tiny Grecian image. Later, as Penelope describes working at her loom, McLean's hands weave invisible landscapes, seascapes and portraits in the air before methodically undoing them again. It is mesmerising physical storytelling. Penelope has promised that she will marry one of her suitors when her weaving is finished. Her solution is beautifully simple: create by day, unpick by night, and keep waiting for Odysseus. And she has been waiting a very long time. There is initially something almost Liza Minnelli-like about McLean's performance, ...

Little Animals – Traverse @ Lyceum Studio

21Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Little Animals – Traverse @ Lyceum Studio

Paul Ready is a familiar face to television audiences, notably as the wonderfully beleaguered Kevin in Motherland and the considerably more sinister Lee in Utopia, alongside an extensive stage career including work at the National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe. Perhaps those credentials are part of the draw behind the sell-out interest in Little Animals. The question is what happens when Ready strips almost everything away and stands alone in a room with a story to tell. Conceived, written and performed by Ready, and directed by Caroline Steinbeis, Little Animals is ostensibly about his best friend Richard. Ready tells us almost immediately that Richard is dead. He is no longer here. Dead. From that stark beginning, he starts piecing together the life of ...

This Is Not Hansel & Gretel – Banshee Labyrinth

19Aug

By Beth EltringhamNo Comments

Scotland

This Is Not Hansel & Gretel – Banshee Labyrinth

If you think you know the old German tale of Hansel and Gretel, think again! Christian Hege challenges us to rethink the tale, providing more detail than ever before and asking us to question who the real villain in the tale is. The tale begins with poverty, famine and too much rain for any crop to survive. A widowed man marries a new woman, welcoming her into his impoverished home with his two young children. As time passes and food proves scarce, the new wife decides enough is enough and the children must go. Luring them into the woods to fend for themselves, the children must learn to keep their wits about them, following their own path home and eventually ending up in the home of a witch. The rest you’ll have to attend the show to hear. Hege is a wonderful storyteller, compel...

Daughter Of Sweden – That One Princess Who Drunk With Lizzie I and Thrown Out of England – The Space@ Surgeons Hall

19Aug

By Beth EltringhamNo Comments

Scotland

Daughter Of Sweden – That One Princess Who Drunk With Lizzie I and Thrown Out of England – The Space@ Surgeons Hall

Very few people can say that they’ve: been a princess, drank with Elizabeth I, caused one of the biggest Swedish sex scandals in history and become a pirate! But for Princess Cecilia Vasa of Sweden this strange and exciting (although at times upsetting) reality was the case. Daughter Of Sweden- That One Princess Who Drunk With Lizzie I and Thrown Out of England, takes a look at a young princess whose life fell apart after engaging in an affair at the age of 19. With her reputation as a pure young lady in tatters, left to the conservatorship of which ever man in her family ended up in charge, she begins to dream of a life where she can be free. Taking a look at the constraints of being a woman of noble status in Sweden during the rule of famously single Elizabeth I, we see how rebell...

11Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Auntie Empire – Summerhall Edinburgh

At Summerhall, as part of the Manipulate Festival, Julia Taudevin’s Auntie Empire is a show that improves as it decays. Performed solo by Taudevin, who also conceived the work, the production opens in a register of playful provocation, leaning heavily on audience participation. Under the guidance of performance director Tim Licata, these early sections clearly aim to implicate the room, drawing the audience into complicity before pulling the rug, but the results are mixed. Some exchanges feel laboured, stretching jokes past their natural lifespan and slightly blunting the edge of the satire. At times, the structure seems more interested in keeping the audience busy than in advancing the analysis. Once the show pivots away from participation and into its more overtly theatrical langua...

Quartermaine’s Terms – Churchill Theatre, Edinburgh

22Mar

By Jessie MartinNo Comments

Scotland

Quartermaine’s Terms – Churchill Theatre, Edinburgh

Presented by Edinburgh People’s Theatre, Quatermaine’s Terms gives a fly-on-the-wall view of a 1960s staffroom within an international school in Cambridge. Spanning over two years, we see the personal lives and relationships of the characters change and adapt, communicated to us by way of staff room gossip. We get a picture of love, death, and loneliness and the characters incessant need to keep it all to themselves - an all too real representation of the stiff upper lip British attitude which eventually leads to the breakdown of each character. The exception to this cycle of change is the Quartermaine himself. Having been with the school since it first opened, the Quartermaine, who seems almost glued to his staff room armchair, has begun to mentally deteriorate lea...

The Land That Never Was – The Studio, Edinburgh

17Mar

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Land That Never Was – The Studio, Edinburgh

Starting life as an idea broached on a Scratch night for budding theatre makers a year ago, Liam Rees brings a fascinating true story of financial fraud to fruition to a packed house tonight. Imagine a country so bountiful in flora and fauna, set in the warm rejuvenating waters of Central America, a tropical paradise, where you would be lord of all you surveyed. This is the dream that Stirling man (Sir) Gregor McGregor sold to over 300 Scots in 1820. The country was Poyais, it had its own currency, parliament, honours system and coat of arms, all described in loving detail in an illustrated 350-page guidebook. But the book, like the story was fake, as was the currency which padded the wallets of the hopeful on their long and perilous journey. The actual destination for the unfortunate S...

1Dec

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Treasure Island – The Lyceum, Edinburgh

The Lyceum Christmas show has landed! And in the tradition of Lyceum Christmas shows passed it (thankfully!) takes a wide berth around the ‘panto’ genre and serves up its own idiosyncratic recipe; take a classic tale, give it an Edinburgh flavour, a sprinkling of humour, a seasonal twist, a large dollop of live music and action, and serve it firmly tongue -in-cheek and aimed squarely at the family market. For the most part, Treasure Island, adapted by Orkney based writer, Duncan McLean, achieves its objectives, and the production is hilarious, fast-paced and always wonderfully musical. In a clever plot twist, we start our tale in a rest home for reformed pirates, no beards, no swashbuckling and absolutely no treasure hunts… Awwww! But old habits are hard to break, timbers req...