Gilded Balloon Archives - Page 3 of 4

Attenborough and His Animals – Gilded Balloon at the Museum

8Aug

By Kathleen MansfieldNo Comments

Scotland

Attenborough and His Animals – Gilded Balloon at the Museum

Jonathan Tilley and Jess Clough-Mcrae are a pair of talented physical mime artists and very entertaining. They both trained in Paris at the Jacques Lecoq clowning school and their skill shines through. When David Attenborough doesn’t turn up as expected they turn to improvisation to provide a show with a myriad different creatures and a commentary very like Sir Attenborough’s. It’s an interactive show. Clough-Mcrae is superb at acting out the animals and making eye contact with the audience. She picked out a family in the front row for special treatment and, honestly, those little ones have memories for life from that one hour. Their dad was singled out and they loved it! I loved the orangutan and the fish and the sloth and the lizard and the crab … okay, I thought it was all ...

ShakeItUp: The Improvised Shakespeare Show – Gilded Balloon Teviot

7Aug

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

Scotland

ShakeItUp: The Improvised Shakespeare Show – Gilded Balloon Teviot

There is nothing I like more than spending an hour watching an improvised show, and I always make sure that my Edinburgh Fringe Festival visits have at least one impro show on my list. This time it’s the turn of ‘ShakeItUp,’ who create a show entirely from the suggestions given by the audience, then perform the show in the style of a Shakespeare play. Now, I have to admit to being a regular visitor to impro shows performed by ‘The School of Night’, who set the bar very high in terms improvising Shakespeare, so I was keen to see whether this troupe (for the want of a better name), could surpass my high expectations. So today, the audience was offered the choice of a history, comedy or tragedy play, and comedy won by a close margin. Next, the name the person yo...

UPSTART! Shakespeare’s Rebel Daughter Judith – Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

6Aug

By Kathleen MansfieldNo Comments

Scotland

UPSTART! Shakespeare’s Rebel Daughter Judith – Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

The talented associate West End director, Alexandra Spencer-Jones (Action to the Word) is known for her physical theatre and musical productions such as Six and Clockwork Orange. So, when the American writer, Mary Jane Schaefer, approached her to direct Upstart! she was both surprised, flattered and a little fearful. It is a gentle play and a perfect play. One of a trilogy Schaefer, has created about the Shakespeare family, Upstart! will delight fans of the Bard. First given a reading at the National Arts Club in New York in 2014, the storyline explores the plight of women, then and now. There is no preaching. But there is a vivid awareness of the modes of suffering and paralysis caused by lack of education and confinement to the domestic domain, where dying children and intransige...

I Was on a Sitcom – The Gilded Balloon, Teviot – Turret

6Aug

By Kathleen MansfieldNo Comments

Scotland

I Was on a Sitcom – The Gilded Balloon, Teviot – Turret

Eden Sher’s show, I Was on A Sitcom, is situated in The Turret at The Gilded Balloon Teviot. It is not easily accessible. The room is hot and Sher sweats her way through the act. It’s perfect … because the subject matter isn’t easily accessible and could bring on a sweat of embarrassment in less capable hands. But not in Sher’s hands. She is a raconteur who can turn anything to gold. Sher jokes, both verbally and physically, about the excruciating pain of giving birth to premature twins. Carrying her babies was an uphill struggle and the pregnancy culminated in a sweaty urgency. She cleverly links this life episode to her ten-year residency on the American sitcom, The Middle, explaining how she became, over time, half her character, Sue, and half herself, split from one egg, like he...

Gone to the Dogs – Gilded Balloon Teviot – Wine Bar

6Aug

By Kathleen MansfieldNo Comments

Scotland

Gone to the Dogs – Gilded Balloon Teviot – Wine Bar

Conceptually, I was intrigued by this piece. Britannia, written and played by Tsarzi, cut an attractive figure with her cheeky grin and mischievous eyes. The set was messy, stuff all over the place, and Britannia was dozing over her piano as the parody of a Radio 4 broadcast opened the show. The play explores the decay of the British Empire: the intransigence of the establishment and the older generation to let it go. A pertinent idea for the times. It is for this reason that the stage is scattered with remnants of a former glory. Even the sash worn by royalty on formal occasions is put on, taken off, held up instead of worn - it is an afterthought. Tsarzi sings us through a host of representations of our fading cultural heritage, mostly in refrains on repeat, including the church, the ...

Comedy Night at the Museum – Gilded Balloon

19Aug

By Kat CliffordNo Comments

Scotland

Comedy Night at the Museum – Gilded Balloon

Comedy Night at the Museum is a hilarious illuminating romp through a litany of exhibits at the National Museum of Scotland. We were guided through this adventure by a smart and witty host. There was some audience interaction and some sharp jokes right from the offset. The host invited a group of ‘professors‘ in the form of a variety of stand-up comedians to come on stage and review slides of museum exhibits and give their ‘academic’, ‘professional’ and …entirely incorrect opinions and interpretations of items from the museum leading to some absolutely absurd, side splitting, hysterical tangents and some bizarre outcomes. The narrative was pushed forward by some intellectual questioning from our host which only served to make these explanations become ever stranger and more ludicrou...

15Aug

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

Scotland

Vermin – Gilded Balloon Teviot

Rats in your home - instantly this subject creates a feeling of uneasiness, uncleanliness, thoughts of scratching noises, thoughts of them nibbling your food in your store cupboards. This play uses this uneasiness and builds upon it. I will explain… Bill (Benny Ainsworth) and Rachel (Sally Paffett) met on a train journey, in which they both witnessed a dramatic event. From this initial acquaintance grew a relationship which ended in wedding bells, but there ends any form of normality. After moving into their new home, the couple found out that Rachel was pregnant, but also realised that their new home was infested with rats. They heard them scratching, the smell was awful, and Bill began the process of attempting to exterminate them. Rats are cleve...

Anna Clifford: I See Dead(ly) People – Gilded Balloon Teviot (Balcony)

15Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Anna Clifford: I See Dead(ly) People – Gilded Balloon Teviot (Balcony)

As anyone who’s ever spent any time in Ireland knows, when something is referred to as ‘deadly’ (or ‘savage’) it generally means ‘good’. Likewise, and not altogether obvious, is that ‘brutal’ just means ‘bad’ and to illustrate it Anna uses the example of a ‘brutal’ murder; it doesn’t mean merciless, it just means whoever committed the felony made a botch of it, one of those Friday afternoon/Monday morning homicides. This is a high-octane performance from a sparky player with a huge presence and the wise-cracks persist throughout as we learn about her family, relationships and hatred of the mood music employed in waxing parlours. The show pivots around events in March 2020 (a month we’ll all probably still be talking about in fifty years’ time) as Anna returns home to see her boyfriend only...

Baxter vs The Bookies – Gilded Balloon Teviot (Wee Room)

15Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Baxter vs The Bookies – Gilded Balloon Teviot (Wee Room)

Our hero William Baxter justifies the chequered life of an inveterate gambler by bemoaning the fact he left school at fifteen with no qualifications, but proudly pointing out he’d made an ashtray in woodwork. This is just the first of many bon mots and one-liners in a one-man play adapted from Roy Granville’s book. One could be forgiven for thinking the role had been written especially for Andy Linden, an actor instantly recognizable (Harry Potter, Count Arthur Strong, to name just two from a long, long line of film and TV credits) his lugubrious face and earthy London tone enabling masterful storytelling. The play was split into five ‘episodes’ each with a twist at the end, Andy playing other parts beyond Baxter; Jeff Armstrong (a bookie so morose that ‘if he ran a funeral parlour peop...

Men With Coconuts – Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

13Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Men With Coconuts – Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

The award-winning local improv troupe returned to the Fringe to illustrate what a double-edged sword the make-it up-as-you-go-along world of improv is. At times inducing belly-laughs, at others a cringe or two and all points in between. OK then, a multi-edged sword. The former was true at the start as our three players bounded onto stage following a frantic jazz soundtrack, repeating the manoeuvre no less than three times to accommodate late-comers. In all the excitement ringmaster Charlie appeared to lose track of his microphone while piano-player Colin dutifully added appropriate incidentals to the chaos and the tone was set, snapping to attention the audience, a key element in this milieu. The guys riffed around various suggested film genres on an imaginary ‘Prime Minister versus Cou...