Traverse Theatre Archives - North West End UK

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 ...

8Aug

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Supposing – Traverse Theatre

Supposing you fell down a hole. Supposing, shortly afterwards, you began hearing voices, seventeen of them in fact, a kind of Greek chorus taking up residence inside your head. And supposing you became convinced that falling down that hole had somehow allowed you to see into the future. Written and directed by Zinnie Harris, Supposing takes this curious premise and turns it into a clever, funny and increasingly unsettling examination of reality, marriage and what happens when nobody believes what you believe to be true. At its centre is Nicole Cooper as Sally, married for fifteen years to Richard, played by Richard Conlon. Cooper establishes an immediate connection with the audience, helped enormously by one of Harris's simplest and most effective theatrical devices. On Alisa ...

Ordinary Elephant – Edinburgh Traverse Bar

28Jul

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Ordinary Elephant – Edinburgh Traverse Bar

There are Banjo jokes too numerous – and withering – but after an evening with Ordinary Elephant, in the apt setting of the Traverse bar, erstwhile gag-writers might be forced to revise their material. In the hands of Pete Damore are revealed hitherto unknown sensitivities and tasteful textures, a perfect complement to the soaring vocals and gentle guitar strumming of Crystal Hariu-Damore. It’s atmospheric and dreamy yet with an edge courtesy of insightful, well-observed lyrics, reminding one instantly of The Delines. ‘…born to be a bigot… don’t mean that I am one…’ from ‘Scars We Keep’ appears to hit home with every member of the audience. And the thing one quickly forgets is that it’s just them, husband and wife, with lushly matched vocals and a stringed instrument each. There’s nothing ...

Catriona Macdonald & Annbjorg Lien – Traverse Theatre

2Jul

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Catriona Macdonald & Annbjorg Lien – Traverse Theatre

It was, as one might expect, a famously fiddly evening at the Traverse Theatre, as Shetland’s Catriona Macdonald and Norway’s Annbjørg Lien brought together a programme rich in Scandinavian and Shetland tunes, shared history and extraordinary musicianship. Presented as the final concert in this season’s Soundhouse series, the evening was built around the musical relationship between two players who first met when they were barely teenagers. That history mattered. This was not simply a meeting of two virtuosos, impressive though both undoubtedly are, but a conversation between traditions, between islands and sea routes, and between generations of musicians passing music from one hand to the next. Macdonald was open, warm and generous throughout, speaking movingly about returning h...