Summerhall Archives - North West End UK

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me – Summerhall

25Sep

By Wendy McEwanNo Comments

Scotland

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me – Summerhall

Ben Harrison and David Paul Jones were both teenagers in the 1980s. Both felt suffocated by their respective small towns, and both found solace in the music of the time. Harrison tells a selection of stories from his youth, and Jones performs his own interpretations of some of those songs. It’s a nostalgic revisit to a vibrant era that now seems defined by its contrasts. Emery Hunter’s integrated BSL interpretation drew me in right from the start. I am not a BSL user, but to me, her performance felt like poetry. Her flowing movements were beautiful to watch, with a rhythm that synchronised with the others on stage, but delightful in their own right. I hope that I will have more chances to see BSL poetry in future. Jones has taken well-known songs and made them his own, from the t...

Heartbreak Hotel – Summerhall, Edinburgh

28Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Heartbreak Hotel – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Feeling more like a work in progress than a completed show, but with oodles of charm, this mixes a lecturing approach to the biochemistry of heartbreak with sketches of interactions between female and male of the species, together with elements of singing and grade one synth (oops that’s the wrong chord!). Throw in a spectacular lighting rig transported all the way from NZ no less, and you end up with something that is really entertaining, and educational!, and with a bit more polish could be really good. It’s pretty kooky though! With something of the Degree Show art installation about it, albeit on a grand scale, a bank of multi-coloured wrap-round LED lights enfolds the performance area, the floor of which is a pink deep pile carpet, like the inside of a living cell, which adds ...

28Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Surrender – Summerhall, Edinburgh

A much anticipated, new play by Sophie Swithinbank, who had such Fringe success last year with Bacon, transferring to London, via Australia before ending up at New York’s Soho Playhouse. Not bad at all for a talented young playwright A single chair awaits actress, Phoebe Ladenburg as she steps on to the sparse Tech Cube performance space, looking nervous and uncertain, like a twitchy actor at an audition. But this might be the most important performance of her life, she is about to meet her daughter. So, she sits and practices different faces and words of greeting, twisting her face in anger and frustration as the exact phrasing and expression is never quite right. When her daughter does arrive she is almost speechless, her face crumples, it is the first time she has seen her no...

27Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

300 Paintings – Summerhall

This is a unique show on so many levels. Perhaps most extraordinary in that it is a true story, told with clarity and humour, but with some big messages about mental health, creativity and redemption. Truly inspirational! Three years ago Australian, Sam Kissajukian’s ten-year love affair with stand-up comedy ended and his shiny new relationship with abstract expressionist painting began. Sam had always had a compulsive, obsessive streak and painting seemed to play right into that sweet spot of being able to release expressive thoughts that telling jokes to drunk strangers at 1am simply didn’t. In June 2021, his first painting, a monochrome self-portrait was created on a large piece of cardboard. During the next six months Sam worked on discarded cardboard, or left over bits of MDF, i...

L’Addition: Here & Now Showcase – Summerhall

26Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

L’Addition: Here & Now Showcase – Summerhall

Two performers Bert and Nasi, dressed smartly in white shirts and grey trousers, one a customer the other a waiter, the roles interchangeable. Who is serving and who is being served, and how do the roles become assigned when seemingly no one is in charge? Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas are no strangers to the Fringe, often covering serious real-world topics like Brexit in 2016 (Eurohouse) or the Syrian conflict in 2017 (Palmyra). This year is a more absurd but no less existential proposition. The pair spend a good ten minutes explaining to the audience what they are about to witness; the waiter is going to pour a glass of wine but is not going to stop, in fact the wine is going to pour everywhere to the point where tablecloth, glass and utensils require to bundled up and thrown sta...

21Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Weather Girl – Summerhall

World Premier Julia McDermot. Remember the name. Sometimes everything just fits. The actor, the script, the venue, the tech, the resonance of the story. This magic realist climate change monologue perfectly sums up the mood of our planet as it sleepwalks towards disaster. Julie McDermott appears, bubbly and smiling, like a human clone popped from a blister pac marked ‘perfect’. Pencil thin, blond haired and button nosed bundle of positivity, squeezed into an electric pink tube skirt, like a walking neon glow stick. She is the Weather Girl for a Californian TV station and totters to the microphones, spotlights and blue screens like a seasoned pro. She reports on a house that is burning as a result of yet another Californian wild fire, with a perky professionalism, “I can’t hold thi...

20Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Piskie – Summerhall, Edinburgh

One of my favourite posters of this years’ Fringe, and a one word title that hints at something….interesting. Couple this with one of my fav performance spaces, a little hidden gem of a venue, a beautifully proportioned theatre, just ten seats wide with a central aisle, focused but friendly, raking back into the darkness, a surprisingly long way…. And at the business end a very nice performance area, about an acre of black cloth enfolds it and damps voices down to a pleasant whisper, but with plenty of tech if you need amplification. Basically, a black box in which magic can happen. Lights duly killed, lecturer Ouida Bert (Lucy Roslyn) employs the torch under the chin (it always works!) to relate a spooky tale of two male friends, a policeman and a barrister, lost on the moor who ta...

18Aug

By Peter KinnockNo Comments

Scotland

The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return – Summerhall

“16 years on this planet and it comes to this…” Sometimes at the Edinburgh Festival amidst all the half-conceived artistic debris, the broken dreams and the ill-informed attempts at theatre, sometimes you stumble across a gem, a highly polished and presented piece which shines out, head and shoulders above the rest - such as the case in “The Chaos That Has Been And Will No Doubt Return” at Summerhall which takes as its narratological background Luton - not the most inspiring of cities in the United Kingdom, but in the hands of Chalk Line theatre company it becomes a fascinating youthful and exuberant place in a production riddled with the joyous exuberance of youth and the concomitant chaos which follows. The play, by a gifted Sam Edmunds, has a vibrant energy that is both engagi...

Sisters Three – Summerhall Anatomy Lecture Theatre

18Aug

By Ben PearsonNo Comments

Scotland

Sisters Three – Summerhall Anatomy Lecture Theatre

TheatreGoose’s Sisters Three is a highly accomplished piece of theatre that takes the audience on an enchanting, funny and often moving journey. The premise is relatively simple; the titular sisters from Chekov’s masterpiece, Irina, Masha and Olaga, are aware that they are in a play (don’t worry you don’t need to have read it). But when Irina wishes for the lives of any other sisters, in any other medium, the three are taken on a whirlwind journey ranging from Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to historical figures and the Sugababes. Writer and director Emma Howlett’s script manages to discuss a range of philosophical and academic questions, including the nature of happiness and freedom, and the place of women within literature, whilst remaining endlessly entertaining. Frequent movement...

Failure Project – Summerhall, Anatomy Lecture Theatre

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Failure Project – Summerhall, Anatomy Lecture Theatre

A new play by BAFTA nominee Yolanda Mercy (Quarter Life Crisis), in which Mercy plays Ade Adeyami, a young British-Nigerian playwright and actor who is still riding the wave of her first play, which has become an unexpected Fringe hit. With this success, and the realisation that she might even be able to make a living from her dream, comes an unexpected problem - a hierarchy of editors, agents and publicists who are there to help, nay manipulate, her. Ade’s second play, Day Girl, about a working-class black kid at a private school, has been commissioned, and paid for, and Ade finds she must now dance to her new masters’ tune. Before she knows it a B-list, minor celebrity influencer with no acting experience is cast in the lead instead of Ade, worst still she want to be ‘collabora...