Summerhall Archives - North West End UK

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...

12Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Julius Caesar Variety Show – Summerhall

There is a lot packed into the short running time of Joy Nesbitt’s Julius Caesar Variety Show. It is energetic, well acted, frequently funny and undoubtedly clever. My reservation is that clever and particularly interesting are not necessarily the same thing. The premise gives Nesbitt plenty to play with. Three actors arrive to audition for Julius Caesar, while outside the theatre an increasingly angry mob protests against plans to convert the building into an asylum hotel. Inside, questions of casting, identity and theatrical power begin to collide as the director pushes his performers in search of something authentic. It is certainly current. The mob outside inevitably carries echoes of recent protests around asylum accommodation, while Shakespeare supplies another mo...

You and Me (and whoever comes next) – Summerhall

12Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

You and Me (and whoever comes next) – Summerhall

One day someone can be the most important person in your world. The next, they can simply disappear. For them, it was a job. For you, it was your life. That asymmetry sits at the heart of You and Me (and Whoever Comes Next), a funny, clever and ultimately moving autobiographical piece from Keron Day, playing himself alongside Lauren Koster as Dani, his new personal assistant. Keron has cerebral palsy and requires 24-hour support. Dani is the latest in a succession of PAs, and Keron takes us entertainingly through some of her predecessors. "Christine is what you get when you order your PA on Temu," he tells us. It also starts to sound remarkably like dating. There are the introductions, the getting to know one another, the irritating habits, the arguments and, eventu...

12Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Come Back Home – Summerhall

There is a danger in making theatre intentionally difficult to understand. Make it oblique enough, abstract enough, strip away rhythm, meter, narrative momentum and familiar cultural reference points, and eventually you have to ask whether the audience is being challenged or simply excluded. Come Back Home walks perilously close to that line. I found myself thinking about Rothko. Put a Rothko beside conventional paintings and its abstraction, colour and absence of recognisable form acquire context. Fill the entire gallery with Rothkos and something changes. If you anchor the absurd against nothing, it isn't even quantifiable as absurd. There is very little here against which to anchor anything. At its centre is a man telling the story of the boy he once was, growing up...

Aufguss X The Waves – Sauna Theatre, Summerhall

11Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Aufguss X The Waves – Sauna Theatre, Summerhall

My God, this is refreshing. And at the Edinburgh Fringe, by the middle of the day I have walked several miles, watched several shows and hauled a bag full of chargers, notebooks and assorted electronic paraphernalia, refreshing is no small achievement. Sauna Theatre is Summerhall's latest experiment in what theatre might actually be. There is a little faff involved. Swimming trunks, flip flops and a couple of towels aren't normally essential reviewing equipment. But changing cubicles and lockers are provided, valuables disappear safely inside, water is handed out and soon a collection of strangers are standing around in varying degrees of undress waiting to see what happens next. What happens next is a sauna. A proper one. I like heat, so naturally I head for the top ben...

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It – Summerhall

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It – Summerhall

Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland are rapidly becoming something approaching Fringe royalty. Arriving from New York on crowdfunding in 2022, they won a Fringe First with And Then the Rodeo Burned Down, then repeated the trick in 2023 and 2024. Three consecutive Fringe Firsts inevitably creates expectation. So, is Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It simply riding a considerable wave of hype? Not a bit of it. This year's Summerhall run is sold out, with the show heading almost immediately afterwards to Soho Theatre in London. On the evidence here, that trajectory feels entirely deserved. Rice and Roland, two diminutive New York clowns with painted faces, impressive physical dexterity and an anarchic imagination, play teenage girls in an isolated Appalachian community who, larg...