Summerhall Archives - North West End UK

27Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Werewolf – Summerhall Techcube Zero

New Zealand collective Binge Culture's Werewolf arrives at Summerhall with considerable word-of-mouth behind it, and sizeable audiences suggest this immersive horror has certainly found its pack. I am less convinced. TechCube Zero provides a naturally effective setting. On arrival, I find someone sitting behind a desk ticking us off and conducting a headcount before reporting back to our three wardens, Joel Baxendale, Stella Reid and Hannah Kelly, who devised and perform the piece. We are Safehouse 656, apparently protected from the lycanthropic horrors outside, and we are informed that we will remain here for seven days. There is a timekeeper and gatekeeper, rules to follow and an initially convincing sense that we have entered a functioning emergency system. On eve...

Horrorshow – Summerhall Anatomy Lecture Theatre

27Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Horrorshow – Summerhall Anatomy Lecture Theatre

There is a good little play struggling to get out of Horrorshow. Written by Doug Deans for Chronic Insanity, this gig-theatre piece follows lifelong Isle of Wight friends Dan and Ollie through one final adventure together before their lives begin moving in very different directions. Deans plays Dan, guitar in hand, alongside Joe Matty as the more academically inclined Ollie on keyboards. Director Joe Strickland completes the live band on drums and percussion, as well as providing the voices of the other characters. Original music and lyrics are by Anya Pearson, who also provides musical direction. The writing has plenty going for it. Dan and Ollie are believable as two young men who have grown up together but are beginning to recognise that friendship doesn't necessarily mea...

24Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Kirsty Mann: Corpse – Summerhall

Summerhall's Red Lecture Theatre is a particularly appropriate home for Corpse. I always find it a slightly creepy, intimate space, but graced with comfortable, nicely raked seating that focuses attention firmly on the stage. There is something about the slightly institutional atmosphere of this particular lecture theatre that feels rather well suited to the ghost story that is about to unfold. And Corpse begins with a premise almost too good to resist. Kirsty Mann is a real-life doctor, a rational, scientifically minded woman who, with her husband Mark, buys a surprisingly cheap house in an area of London where they had never expected to be able to afford one. Immediately, alarm bells ring. Why so cheap? Then strange things start happening. Even the purchase it...

Boogie on the Bones – Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall

24Aug

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

Scotland

Boogie on the Bones – Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall

Within Theatre Company is an award-winning company, brought together from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine by the reality of their situation of being displaced and working in London. As an ensemble, they create work that shares their belief in freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and using art to resist oppression and totalitarianism. It is therefore, fitting that they have chosen to write about an era in the history of the Soviet Union following the death of Stalin, when a section of the young Soviet community chose to rebel against the grey nature of their existence, in 1955 Moscow. This underground counterculture movement called themselves the Stilyagi (style hunters), they wanted to love a more colourful life with jazz music, dancing, and to express their passions wi...

Mysteries of the Picts – Sauna Theatre Summerhall

22Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Mysteries of the Picts – Sauna Theatre Summerhall

There is something wonderfully Fringe about sitting in a sauna with 47 other souls while being invited to contemplate whether the Picts were partial to a good steam. Mysteries of the Picts explores not only Pictish culture but the much longer history of sauna itself, looking at archaeological evidence for sweathouses and communal bathing stretching back thousands of years. When it comes specifically to the Picts, things become rather more speculative. There is no firm archaeological evidence that they used saunas, although the production reasonably suggests that sacred gathering places may subsequently have disappeared beneath churches, civic buildings and other later development. It is interesting, although the history and archaeology remain somewhat vague. Where the produc...

16Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

ROLEPLAY – Summerhall

Sex sells. It always has and judging by the sold-out run of ROLEPLAY at Summerhall, it probably always will. The skin-heavy posters are everywhere, the publicity machine has worked extraordinarily well, but there is an uncomfortable question here. Is ROLEPLAY exploiting the very thing it purports to condemn? Written and performed by Hannah Reilly, this one-woman show follows Danni, a feminist podcaster who discovers that sexualising herself brings the attention her more earnest work could not. There is potentially fertile ground here, the commodification of feminism, online identity and the uncomfortable intersection between empowerment and exploitation. Reilly is undoubtedly a committed and energetic performer. My problem is not so much with the performance a...

Morning Sauna Rave – Sauna Theatre Summerhall

15Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Morning Sauna Rave – Sauna Theatre Summerhall

There is something slightly perverse about setting an alarm to go to a rave. Admittedly, Morning Sauna Rave does not start until 10.30am, but during the Edinburgh Fringe that still feels positively dawn-like. A sunny walk across Edinburgh past Arthur’s Seat certainly helps, and by the time I am stripped down to swimwear and heading into the heat, the prospect of starting the day with music, steam and a cold plunge seems increasingly sensible. This is my latest visit to Sauna Theatre, the extraordinary temporary structure occupying Summerhall’s rear courtyard, on the very spot where Paines Plough’s Roundabout was launched in 2014. Designed for 80 people, it is both the UK’s largest sauna and its first purpose-built sauna arts centre. Having visited before, I remain im...

The Wreck – Edinburgh Summerhall (Old Lab)

14Aug

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

The Wreck – Edinburgh Summerhall (Old Lab)

An oft-overlooked aspect of many theatre productions is the music/soundtrack/sound design(er), call it what you will… but this (Faye James) was the foundation of this show; dreamy, fragile, melancholic but beautiful, reflected in the dialogue between the two siblings, Eddie (Morgan Beale) and Ira (Camilla Anvar). What’s more, aside from the tech and beats mastery on display, it started with an accordion. The brother and sister have convened in a faded seaside town following the demise of their parents and some context is lightly sketched in as they gently bicker. Their parents had a club ‘The Dancer’ and it’s fallen upon hard times, the chief patrons being two local, rival societies, one keen on whales, the other on bones in general. Ira knows this because she stayed while Eddie lef...

Bubble Schmeisis (remixed) – Sauna Theatre, Summerhall

14Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Bubble Schmeisis (remixed) – Sauna Theatre, Summerhall

Of all this year’s Sauna Theatre propositions at Summerhall, Bubble Schmeisis (Remixed) perhaps feels the most like theatre. There is good reason for that. Nick Cassenbaum’s one-man show was already a sell-out Fringe and international success long before anybody decided to put the audience into swimsuits and turn up the heat. Ten years on, it has found what feels like its natural home. This is not simply an old stage show squeezed into a sauna. It feels like a genuine evolution of the piece, with Nick now performing the story inside the very environment he has spent years describing. And the experience begins before we even get there. Live klezmer music, created for the show by Daniel Gouly and Josh Middleton, accompanies us as we wait to enter and continues inside, becom...

Salty Brine: How Strange It Is – Summerhall

13Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Salty Brine: How Strange It Is – Summerhall

Weird, uplifting, heartfelt. Salty Brine does not simply perform an album. He takes it apart, rummages around inside it, follows its obsessions down unexpected rabbit holes, then somehow puts the whole thing back together again in front of us. And this particular concoction is no overnight creation, this one has been marinating in Brine for the best part of a decade, part of Salty’s long-running Living Record Collection, in which numerous albums become the starting point for something altogether more theatrical, personal and peculiar. The album at the heart of this one is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, released in 1998, a record whose strangeness and relative unfamiliarity turn out to be one of the show’s great strengths. Unless you are already a...