Traverse Theatre Archives - North West End UK

Tandem at Ten: A Festival of Words – Traverse Theatre

28Sep

By Wendy McEwanNo Comments

Scotland

Tandem at Ten: A Festival of Words – Traverse Theatre

Tandem is a writing collective established and run by playwrights Jennifer Adam, Amy Hawes and Mhairi Quinn. This new writing showcase celebrates their tenth anniversary, featuring a varied, thoughtfully curated selection of pieces including plays, poetry, prose and music. As we enter Trav 1, musician Gillian plays her own hauntingly melodic compositions on the piano, creating an atmosphere of expectation. Cunnison plays transition music between each piece as well. The showcase opens with a short play called The Will of the People, written by Charlotte Smith. A politician (Nicola Roy), and her bodyguard (Jenny Hulse) are waiting for hospital staff to identify a mystery substance thrown at them by a protester. As the scene unfolds, the limits of democracy are exposed. It’s a thoug...

28Sep

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Balisong – Traverse Theatre

Short but perfectly formed, Balisong occasionally comes perilously close to feeling like a public-information film about the dangers of knives. But perhaps that is hardly surprising. Jennifer Adam's play was originally commissioned by No Knives Better Lives, produced with Fast Forward and developed in consultation with young people. It was subsequently recommissioned twice and, between 2017 and 2019, toured schools in every local authority in Scotland. And yet, sitting in the Traverse, I can't help being affected by it. Isn't that, after all, one of the points of theatre? To write something with purpose, with an allegory; something that seeks not merely to entertain but perhaps to make a difference? Its timing is particularly poignant. A few miles away in Leith stands t...

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 ...

11Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Singer – Traverse Theatre

There is a lovely irony running through The Singer. This is a show fascinated by the importance of finding the flow in music, yet it is a production which repeatedly struggles to find its own. Perhaps that is entirely intentional. Life is messy. Creativity is messy. Relationships are certainly messy, and the relationship between Joe, a profoundly Deaf songwriter, and Andy, a musician whose own career has fallen apart, was never going to travel in a conveniently straight line. So perhaps the stops, starts and sudden changes of direction are part of Cora Bissett's design. But that raises another question. Is the mess what an audience actually wants, or do we still crave the simplicity of a story which knows where it is taking us? There is an enormous amount to admire here. J...

11Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

After Party – Traverse Theatre

Imagine inviting the family round for your 80th birthday, pouring the drinks, cutting the cake and then announcing that you intend to be dead tomorrow. That is the grenade Vivienne Blackwood throws into the celebrations in Morna Young’s After Party. A celebrated former actress, Vivienne has terminal cancer and has decided that she will determine the manner and timing of her own death. She wants her fractured family around her when she does it. You could hardly ask for a more combustible theatrical premise. What is surprising is how rarely After Party allows it to explode. This Traverse Theatre production, in association with Paines Plough and the Belgrade Theatre and directed by Katie Posner, initially treats the gathering remarkably broadly. The first half freq...

Mrs Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library – Traverse Theatre

10Aug

By Tom ScottNo Comments

Scotland

Mrs Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library – Traverse Theatre

The cell door opens, and a terrified woman is bundled into a dingy, dimly lit basement. A uniformed police officer aggressively tells her to give him her handbag and empties its contents on a table. He orders her to take off her coat and raise her arms, then frisks her. The interrogation starts. This is the dramatic start to ‘Mrs Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library’, Jenny Lyn Bader’s fascinating play which recently had its premiere Off-Broadway in New York and is now being seen for the first time in Europe in the Traverse’s studio theatre. The play is inspired by the real-life experience of Hannah Arendt, the political theorist and philosopher, who was briefly imprisoned by the Nazis. It is 1933. The previous year the Nazis had become the largest party in the Reichstag, and ...

10Aug

By Danielle FarrowNo Comments

Scotland

Bog Witch – Traverse Theatre

A few branches and linen-looking sheets, fresh air and husbandry, home produce and homemade felt. How simple! Here’s permaculture, with a touch of children’s story narration, a one-eyed cat and some fine song and dance, all amid the beautiful changing seasons. How sweet! NOT when it is Bryony Kimmings’ take on the reality of uprooting for love, being a mackerel out of water, having a huge personal hole to fill, and a bog calling you to surrender to the witch. Bryony Kimmings’ exploration of life and climate changes makes the sweet saucy and the simple complex. Bog Witch - showing Kimmings’ own reluctant move to the country - is fantastically full of cynical city-slick humour, hilarious and highly adept physicality and wit, and strange rural practices. The unexpected is peppered w...

10Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Cathy – Traverse Theatre

Tommy never appears, we don't see him alive, in flashback or even in a photograph. Yet by the end of Eilidh Loan's beautifully observed new play, I felt I knew him. That is quite some trick. Tommy is dead before the story begins, leaving Cathy to negotiate that peculiar new country called widowhood. Elaine C. Smith, making a heroic return to the Traverse stage after 26 years, gives us a woman whose stoicism is matched only by her capacity to find humour in the darkness. And Cathy is surprisingly, wonderfully funny. Not polite theatrical chuckling, but genuine laugh out loud funny. Loan understands something fundamental about grief and perhaps about Scottish families: sometimes you laugh because the alternative is crying. During this performance, plenty of people did both. T...

8Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

For Dolores – Traverse Theatre

Two larger-than-life women. One very small lift. Sparks are inevitably going to fly. Eva O’Connor’s For Dolores throws Réaltín, a little Irish star with an inexhaustible capacity for storytelling, together with Mo, a gloriously forthright Glaswegian, in a broken-down lift. What follows is surely one of the great encounters of this year’s Fringe. Lara McDonnell as Réaltín and Catriona Faint as Mo make a classic double act, and an unusually refreshing all-female one. Réaltín embellishes and romanticises, Mo punctures and corrects. When Réaltín recalls romantically “coming off the boat” from Ireland, Mo reminds her that she actually got off a £19.99 Ryanair flight. That rhythm drives the play. A joke becomes an insult, an insult becomes affection, and affection occasionally revea...

8Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Water Colour – Traverse Theatre

There is something very frustrating about a play centred on a painter that never quite convinces you that its protagonist actually paints. Written by Milly Sweeney and directed by Sally Reid, Water Colour arrives in Edinburgh with considerable acclaim and an impressive collection of awards behind it, which makes my reaction to it all the more surprising. I found the writing naive, the storytelling resolutely linear and the theatrical world surrounding its central character’s art strangely unconvincing. The structure is very much: this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Events accumulate but rarely seem to deepen. Molly Geddes as Esme, the young artist at the centre of the story, and Ryan J Mackay as Harris give perfectly reasonable performances, but the writing rarely ...