The best theatre, music and dance shows to see at the Edinburgh festivals

Overwhelmed by flyers on the Mile? Lost in the zillions of options as to what to see during your time in the Scottish capital? We’ve compiled our reviews of the 2024 Edinburgh Festival and Fringe theatre, music and dance shows (if you’re looking for comedy recommendations, we have a separate list). It’s ranked according to rating, from five stars downwards and the booking details are there too: do check what is still available. This page will be updated every day in August so make sure you save it. And feel free to write in the comment section to let us know what your highlights have been and what we should see.
★★★★★Instead of a dutiful journey through the back catalogue of the woman who was best known as the wife of Johnny Cash (she died in 2003, just months before he left us too) the actress Charlene Boyd has created a poignant but feisty play that is part documentary, part concert, part confessional. Although she starts proceedings dressed up retro-style, wearing a dark lacquered wig and a turquoise gown, circa 1955, she puts an autobiographical spin on the proceedings, explaining how she worked on the project during lockdown, treating it as a way of coming to terms with her daily struggles as a harried single mother. To August 24, edfringe.com; touring August 28-September 22, gridiron.org.ukClive DavisRead the full June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music and Me review
★★★★★Since their last show in 2022, the lives of Sh!t Theatre’s two creators, Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, have changed enormously. Both have experienced overwhelming losses and have had to live in the throes of inescapable grief.
Their new show, Or What’s Left of Us, asks whether it is possible to find joy in the pits of sadness. It’s an extraordinary piece of theatre reflecting the universal incomprehensibility of death. Yet while accepting tragedy — and there really is a lot of it — Or What’s Left of Us also rejoices in life. At the end we’re invited into the next door bar for a sing-song. This coda is well needed as a cry of celebration as well as a release.To August 25, summerhall.co.uk Anya RyanRead the full Or What’s Left of Us review
★★★★★Every Brilliant Thing, the mega Fringe hit by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe from ten years ago, is back — even more extraordinary, shattering and beautiful than before. The same actor, a magnificent Donahoe, again plays the unnamed boy whose story begins with his mum’s suicide attempt when he was seven “because she was sad”. Determined for her to realise that life is worth living, he starts to make a list of every brilliant thing in the world. The script is rich with theatrical innovation, even ten years on. And seeing it now adds a sense of reflection. Suicide is still reported carelessly. Too much focus is still placed on the “why” and “how”. There is no quick fix for depression, but among all the darkness Macmillan and Donahoe’s script bathes in the everyday joys. Built with the collaboration of audience and performer, it is a truly brilliant thing. I wrote this with tears in my eyes. To August 24, summerhall.co.ukARRead the full Every Brilliant Thing review
★★★★★Coming of age dramas are in no shortage. Still, it is rare to see the world of teenagers portrayed with such colour onstage. Julia Grogan has squeezed every ounce out of the experience of girlhood and laid it bare in all its cruelty, ugliness, uncertainty and delight, in this marvellous jewel of a play.
Best friends Keira (Sophie Cox), Zainab (Nina Cassells) and Lucy (an outstanding Lucy Mangan) meet by their designated hangout spot, a tree, for daily catch-ups, outbursts and confessions. They are on the cusp of adulthood, hungry for their sexual awakenings to begin. Keira lies about her age to lose her virginity. Zainab realises she likes girls. And Lucy is stuck trying to balance her newfound desires with religion. Directed by Emma Callendar, the girls take turns to masquerade their true feelings. But their passing glances and fleeting touches give them away: Callendar makes each small gesture speak a thousand unsaid words. To August 26, festival24.summerhall.co.ukARRead the full Playfight review
★★★★★Half the choir and quite a few punters were in tears after this morning concert, so super-charged was it with emotions of all varieties. The Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, just 17-strong but quite capable of blowing the roof off the Queen’s Hall, not only sang a revelatory two-hour programme of mostly unfamiliar choral music from the Americas, but they also delivered all its rich harmonies and zingy rhythms entirely from memory, guided magisterially by their veteran conductor Maria Guinand.
Follow that, Yuja Wang at the Usher Hall later. Delicately shimmering Chopin (Four Ballades), crystal-clear counterpoint in some Shostakovich preludes and fugues, and a brilliantly persuasive interpretation of Samuel Barber’s knotty Piano Sonata, with its final fugue taken at a storming pace — all just a warm-up. She then gave her customary eight encores, ranging from a Chinese song to an astonishing arrangement of the demonic scherzo from Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 8. Who needs four players when you have a pianist who apparently has four hands?RMRead the full Schola Cantorum/Yuja Wang review
★★★★★Based on their work over the past seven days, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra would give any full-time opera company a run for their money, so vibrantly expressive has their playing been. This Così positively zinged right from the whipcrack overture, with lithe strings, chuckling winds and period brass and timpani that gave the score real bite. But every effect was used to serve Mozart’s drama, and in that the orchestra had a not-so-secret weapon in their principal conductor, Maxim Emelyanychev.Simon ThompsonRead the full Così fan tutte review
★★★★★If the rest of the Edinburgh International Festival matches its first 24 hours for audience excitement, innovation and pizzazz, it will be three weeks to remember. On Friday night thousands gathered in the grounds of George Heriot’s School and watched that vast 17th-century edifice dance before their eyes with a megawatt soundtrack that cheerfully melded Wagner, Verdi, Scottish folk music and much else. Then on Saturday morning the countertenor superstar Jakub Jozef Orlinski and the superb instrumentalists of Il Pomo d’Oro opened the Queen’s Hall recital series by turning a lot of mostly obscure 17th-century Italian arias into one of the most entertaining concerts of baroque music. And EIF’s first Usher Hall concert was superbly performed and musically fascinating. Festival continues to August 25, eif.co.ukRMRead the full EIF opening events review
★★★★✰Blink and there’s a chance you’ll miss it altogether. Early on in this unassuming but poignant solo piece we catch a tantalisingly brief glimpse of a hazy black-and-white TV clip showing the Tottenham footballer John White playing against Leicester City in the 1961 FA Cup final.
The following year, the graceful Scottish midfielder was cut down in his prime, killed by lightning as he sheltered under a tree while playing a round of golf. It’s an incident I remember reading about in my football-mad childhood, but I assumed there might not be much of an audience for a drama six decades after White’s death.
How wrong I was. It was a struggle to find an empty seat at this performance, the venue filled mainly with grey-haired men like the ones who sat behind me, passing the time before the start by having a long conversation about Scotland’s tactics in the Euros.
Soon they fell silent, absorbed in the tale so engagingly delivered by Cal Newman, who plays both White and his son Rob, who commissioned this drama after publishing a book about his father’s brief but illustrious career (he was 27 when he died).
A well-travelled trunk containing memorabilia is the only prop apart from a video screen and a modest strip of artificial turf. Newman begins his narrative on the last day of White’s life and then gradually works his way backwards as he explains how a skilful player who was originally regarded as too slight in stature to compete at the top level became a member of the best English team of its era, alongside players such as Jimmy Greaves.
The soft-spoken Rob, meanwhile, attempts to piece together memories of the father he never knew. Like so many of the plays and comedy shows on the Fringe, there’s a strong therapeutic streak amid the thumbnail portraits of Spurs legends such as the manager Bill Nicholson and the fearsome defender Dave Mackay. If the final quarter is slightly lacking in narrative drive, Murphy and Newman still do an assured job of evoking an era when star players led lives that weren’t so very different from those of the fans who paid to watch them every Saturday. To August 26, Underbelly, edfringe.comClive Davis
★★★★☆Julia Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth is halfway between oratorio and music theatre. It tells the story of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, New York City’s worst industrial disaster, and this performance, kicking off the Philharmonia’s EIF residency, starred the female voices of the National Youth Choir of Scotland and the National Girls Choir.
Wolfe’s piece is scored for 146 singers, one for each of the fatalities, and her objective is to give a voice to the victims who had none. Consequently, the singing of the female voices was the most powerful thing about this performance, sweet but raw, with first-rate diction and tone that could evoke both the anticipation of a new life and the horror of its loss.
Marin Alsop conducted the piece with excitement and pace, and the Philharmonia’s colourful playing brought to life all of Wolfe’s cleverly scored effects, such as the col legno scraping to evoke the factory floor or the dark string glissandi of the fire.
Sometimes it felt as if there was a void in the music’s heart, that it was evoking some episodes rather than immersing us in their tragedy, and Anne Kaufmann’s direction reinforced that, as though the visuals were trying to fill a gap that the music couldn’t. When at its most powerful, however, it was very moving, most especially when the auditorium was flooded with singers, with one voice demanding dignity and recognition. ST
★★★★☆Stephin Merritt’s band are taking their opus, 69 Love Songs, on the road for a 25th-anniversary victory lap in a beautifully staged performance that’s epic in nature. Perched on a stool and looking by turns amused and glum, the New York-based songwriter led them on a thrillingly spooky ghost-train ride through the cavernous depths of the human heart.
He is an equally accomplished chronicler of heartache and misery. The Velvet Underground and Morrissey were evoked on I Don’t Want to Get Over You. Meanwhile, The Book of Love — a ballad covered by Peter Gabriel — combined the stately chill of an Emily Dickinson verse with Abba’s The Winner Takes It All.
Concerts following the track listing of a beloved album can be double-edged. Everyone knows what’s coming next, so where’s the surprise? 69 Love Songs benefits from being perfectly sequenced, with the Fast Show-style jazz parody Love Is Like Jazz swerving satisfyingly into the jangling When My Boy Walks Down the Street.
The best moments arrived as the final curtain loomed. Sung by the guitarist Anthony Kaczynski, Grand Canyon pulsated with stormy melancholy. Simms next took over on lead vocals for No One Will Ever Love You, a pop-rock banger that suggested a cello-fuelled Fleetwood Mac. No Swiftie-style friendship bracelets were exchanged, but as the crowd erupted into applause and even a few cautious whoops, there was a shared feeling of having witnessed a spectacular of the first order. A bleak, bittersweet album about love had filled the room with joy. Edinburgh Queen’s Hall, August 24-25, then touring until September 1, houseoftomorrow.comEd Power
★★★★☆It starts slowly, but this gentle American puppet play about a man who lives a solitary life turns out to be an object lesson in how to build a story through an exquisitely layered collection of closely observed details. Our hero, Bill, looks like a failure at first. Throwing a party to celebrate his birthday, he finds himself waiting and waiting for guests to arrive. Does he actually have any friends? Will he be forced to invent some?
At first sight, he is an unprepossessing figure, not much more than a paunchy, life-sized torso, head and arms manipulated by the co-creators Andy Manjuck and Dorothy James. But if the first ten minutes drift by in a moderately amusing series of gags, the subtlety of the writing draws you ever closer as the host gamely tries to keep his spirits up. Played out to the accompaniment of Eamon Fogarty’s jazzy score, the deft physical humour and the hint of existential angst may remind some older audience members of the genial tableaux served up in that vintage animated TV series, The Pink Panther Show.
A third puppeteer, Jon Riddleberger, joins in as the party begins to heat up. As Bill sheds his inhibitions, helped along by a steady supply of punch, the festivities threaten to take on a more sombre tone. Dark is very much the mood of choice at the Fringe. What makes this delightful show all the more appealing is that it finds redemption in the end without indulging in sentimentality. That’s a rare achievement. To August 25, edfringe.comCD
★★★★☆This joyous Edinburgh International Festival show from Peru’s Teatro La Plaza is only loosely based on Shakespeare’s tragedy (the truncated running time of 100 minutes alone would tell you that). Instead, the play’s key scenes and speeches form triggers for the ensemble — all with Down’s syndrome — to tell their own stories while reflecting on the whole business of creativity and performance from a neurodivergent perspective.
Thus, the Dane’s confused courtship of Ophelia opens up a frank exploration of relationships and sexuality. Polonius’s ruthless stewarding of his daughter leads the cast to share stories of being infantilised by their parents and society, the frequent comparison to angels and lack of personal agency. The key recurring soliloquy, inevitably, is “To be or not to be”, presented as a choice between assimilation or activism. A scene in which the actor Jaime Cruz attempts to ape Olivier’s performance in the noirish film adaptation is brilliant, not least because it jolts us into recognising Larry’s mannerisms and empty posturing.
The show, written and directed by Chela De Ferrari, features many such funny set pieces, but it is also raw, confrontational and genuinely anarchic. While the eight-strong ensemble isn’t afraid to discomfort and tease the (largely) neurotypical audience, this comes across as a prelude to forging connection and understanding. As such, Hamlet exemplifies this year’s international festival theme of “rituals that unite us”. To August 17, eif.co.ukAllan Radcliffe
★★★★☆Lockdown restrictions forced Scottish Opera to explore site-specific productions during the pandemic. They turned out to be very good at them so their contribution to 2024’s Edinburgh International Festival — Oedipus Rex staged in the Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland — plays to their strengths.
Stravinsky’s reworking of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy speaks to the festival’s 2024 theme of rituals as the audience is summoned to witness it among some of the ancient artefacts of the museum’s collection. Roxana Haines’s production places the orchestra in the middle of the floor while the singers process around them on an elevated stage, and a community chorus acts in stylised gestures. Meanwhile, the gods, extravagantly costumed by Anna Orton, look down impassively from the upper galleries.
The best thing about the concept is the monumental vastness of the sound in this space, particularly in the ritualistic choral scenes that begin and end the opera. The conductor Stuart Stratford, aided by a team of assistants beating time around the hall, keeps things big and muscular.
They can’t solve the problems intrinsic to any promenade production, however. Wherever you are, at least half of the action takes place at the opposite end from where you’re standing, and the hall is so full that there isn’t really space to move around. The scale of the acoustic also means that a lot of the more subtle orchestral details simply disappear, although admittedly there aren’t many of those in this score.
Yet you can forgive a lot when the singing is this good. Shengzhi Ren sings Oedipus with astringent energy that befits his character’s tragic grandeur and Roland Wood performs Creon with bluff power. Callum Thorpe’s Tiresias is impressive, as is the booming messenger of Emyr Wyn Jones. Finest of all is Kitty Whately’s Jocasta, strident and majestic while retaining the character’s encroaching sense of doom. This cast of soloists is the main reason this zany idea just about comes off. To August 19, eif.co.ukSimon Thompson
★★★★☆This is a classy, relaxed and generous-spirited hour of song, dance and spoken word from a bona fide West End star turned environmental activist. Janie Dee has written, directed and produced the show herself, motivated by the kind of worries that might make anyone ask, “What can I do to save the planet?” Rather than get on a soapbox, Dee’s strategy is to utilise her talents — and those of a small but choice supporting cast — to raise our consciousness engagingly through entertainment.
Dee exudes an easy energy, slipping information — statistics, personal anecdotes and a plug for the thematically-related Fringe music and puppetry show Breathe — to us via between-song patter. The songs themselves are suitably chosen and cleverely reframed. In this context Fever, Tom Lehrer’s Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and Stephen Sondheim’s Another Hundred People take on new but unforced meaning.
Dee’s musical-comedy chops come to the fore in a vintage novelty number about being a mermaid. She is also a slinky mover and, utilising her dramatic skills, drops in a bit of relevant Shakespeare. Credit, too, to others in the spotlight such as Josephine Ortiz Lewis, a gifted young singer and dancer and the musicians Sarah Harrison (violin) and Igor Outkine (accordion) who tear with beautiful fury into Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. To August 26, pleasance.co.uk; Theatre at the Tabard, September 19-21 and Jermyn Street Theatre September 24-28, janiedee.com
★★★★☆The British theatrical innovators YESYESNONO’s quasi-solo show is at once an intriguingly enigmatic thriller, a collective act of imagination and a caution against nationalism. And, as in some of the company’s previous productions, the format is stripped-back storytelling.
Sam Ward draws us in via the reassuringly repetitive rhythms of his near-flawlessly delivered words. With sly surety he casts audience members as residents of a perfectly ordinary town visited by an unidentified stranger whose presence has initially eerie then alarming repercussions. The action — all of it implanted in our heads by Ward — shifts from retirement party to civic meeting to murder on the high street.
Given the country’s recent race riots, the content and underlying themes of Ward’s text could hardly be more topical. He smartly taps into the feelings of loss that can lurk beneath xenophobia, a mindset eventually made explicit. Ultimately, however, something crucial is missing from this foreboding, well-told but not entirely convincing yarn. To August 25, summerhall.co.ukDonald Hutera
★★★★☆Of course Miriam Margolyes rules in this new solo performance. Could we expect anything less from an 83 year-old national treasure? And what a treat it is to spend time in her company, even if that means sharing her with the hundreds of others packed into a vast auditorium. The show is a belated follow-up to Dickens’ Women, a previous tribute to the work of her most beloved author that premiered at the Fringe in 1989 and toured the world. Here Margolyes has split her time slot in two, delivering readings from half a dozen or so scenes from Dickens novels and then fielding questions from the audience with her trademark wit, wisdom and candour. To August 15, pleasance.co.ukDHRead our full Miriam Margolyes review
★★★★☆Dance is scarce in this year’s International Festival, but got off to a sharp and vivid start with an exhilaratingly performed, aurally intoxicating double bill from one of Brazil’s most emblematic troupes.
The curtain-raiser, Gil Refazendo (the latter word translates as “remaking”), is cued to music by the veteran composer, activist and politician Gilberto Gil in his seamless rearrangements. Dancers — 22 in total — in light garb come and go in a restless yet breezy and sexy fashion. These tireless, loose-limbed whirlwinds respond to Gil’s marvellously varied rhythms with lush precision. Hands flick, hips and spines undulate, feet lick the floor. Such busy bees they are, following united and contrapuntal flight paths. Meanwhile, the backdrop is a slow, continuous scroll of close-up footage of what turns out to be a field of sunflowers.
The choreographic patterns devised by the company co-founder Rodrigo Pederneiras are less formulaic in Gira, an episodic, darker-toned work that chimes with the festival’s theme of “rituals that unite us”. Here the bare-chested and beskirted ensemble, throats and necks bathed bright red, embody a series of mysterious, ecstatic, sometimes weird or even cruel kinetic ceremonies set to the Sao Paulo jazz group Meta Meta’s propulsive, excitingly abrasive score. That and the supremely confident dancers’ urgency, which is occasionally unsettling, pull you through. To August 7, eif.co.ukDH
★★★★☆If you haven’t heard of the composer Hans Rott, you’re not alone. Alongside Mahler, Rott studied with Bruckner in 19th-century Vienna, but was afflicted with psychosis and died at 25, so never fulfilled his early potential. His Symphony No 1 was rediscovered in 1989, and enthusiastic advocates have since hailed Rott as a progenitor of Mahler and the new music of his time.
One such supporter is Jakub Hrusa. He’s probably of most interest to UK audiences as the conductor about to take charge of London’s Royal Opera, but he’s also the chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony orchestra in Germany. He chose Rott’s symphony in a programme to kick off the orchestra’s three-day residency at the Edinburgh International Festival.
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Don’t believe the hype: it’s no masterpiece, and there are only general similarities in the way he and Mahler handle their material. Rott’s symphony has attractive melodies but serious structural problems, most especially the hulking finale, the first ten minutes of which fumble around emptily like a slow-burner that doesn’t burn. The rest is uncomfortably imitative of the finale of Brahms’ First Symphony.
That said, it’s terrifically entertaining in places, and if you’re ever going to hear it, the Bambergers must be the most powerful advocates you could find. They lavished all their care on it, and on Bruckner’s Symphonic Prelude, another clunker that opened the concert. The glorious richness of the orchestra’s string sound is a marvel whatever they’re playing, and they made the opening of the slow movement sound as luxurious and welcoming as a warm bath. Their majestic brass and singing winds had a whale of a time in the scherzo, effectively an oversized country dance, while the full orchestral tutti sound was always remarkably clean with never a hint of congestion.
The symphony is lucky to have a defender like Hrusa because he conducted it with all the conviction and energy that he’d bring to Wagner or Bruckner. Hearing Mahler next to Rott, however, feels like turning to the real deal, and his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen illustrated what a real compositional genius is like at the start of his career, every orchestral colour carefully deployed and economically used. Catriona Morison’s beautifully rich mezzo-soprano voice sailed effortlessly over the orchestra, capturing the ebullience and rage of the middle songs before finding something approaching peace in the poignant resignation of the ending. To August 9, eif.co.ukST
★★★★☆Could the debut playwright Daisy Hall be the new Beckett? Her 2023 Women’s Prize-nominated work, set in a church steeple in rural Oxfordshire, certainly suggests so. Embracing the stagnation of Godot, two young men who have always “come as a pair” wait to ring the bells in hope of ending the raging storm outside. Is this the past, present or future? Hall has a knack of making us feel as if we’re everywhere and nowhere all at once. What is clear is that a merciless apocalypse is already in motion.
Jessica Lazar’s production is a fervid, metaphysical feat that balances the comic elements of the play with looming tragedy. The duo, Clement and Aspinall (an enchanting Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa), know this day is likely to be their last. It’s impossible to ignore how many bellringers have previously been “frazzled”. But, perhaps with enough prayer and belief in ancient superstitions, good fortune will come their way.
Bellringers is a parable, aptly created for the climate crisis age. But it is as much a tale of hope as it is warning. While her script occasionally dips in focus, Hall’s natural poetic skill is unfaltering. At once maddeningly elusive and devastatingly poignant, this is an alluring piece. To August 26, festival24.summerhall.co.ukAR
★★★★☆Edmond Rostand’s 1897 drama about the 17th-century soldier and man of letters with the outsized nose seems more omnipresent than ever, thanks to recent well-received stage productions and a high-profile film version. So just when it looked like a fresh take on Cyrano de Bergerac would be nigh on impossible, along comes Virginia Gay’s funny, offbeat adaptation, with a gender-switched love story at its heart.
Gay impresses in the title role, able to turn on a sixpence between Cyrano’s famed panache and a darker introspection. The central love triangle, in which Cyrano vicariously expresses her love for the brilliant, beautiful Roxanne (Jessica Whitehurst) by supplying words of love for the tongue-tied suitor Yan (Brandon Grace), sits nested within an intriguing play-within-a-play conceit. A bickering chorus of three amusingly bridges the gap between the audience and the performance.
The odd solemn moment aside, Gay’s script repeatedly punctures highfalutin seriousness, questioning gender roles in theatrical tragedy with tart humour, and supplying Whitehurst’s Roxanne with her own voice and agency. If the action peters out towards the end, Clare Watson’s production offers much fun and engagement along the way. To August 25, traverse.co.ukAllan Radcliffe
★★★★☆The American playwright Adam Rapp is no stranger to the Fringe, having come to attention there in 2006 with Finer Noble Gases, about a struggling East Village rock band. His subjects have matured along with his characters. The protagonist and narrator of his Tony-nominated play The Sound Inside is Bella, a 53-year-old Yale English professor and writer. Single and devoted to books, she has recently received a grave diagnosis of “good old-fashioned cancer”.
This would make for an interesting dramatic premise in itself, and Madeleine Potter’s quietly authoritative performance holds you from the outset. The play’s real interest, though, is in the relationship between Bella and her creative writing student Christopher (Eric Sirakian), an intense youth with a worldview completely out of his time. Christopher is writing a novel, and as the pair’s connection deepens, the slow, steady build-up of tension in the young man’s work-in-progress swells in tandem with Bella’s burgeoning fascination with him.
Staged with spare precision by Matt Wilkinson and featuring beautifully pitched performances, Rapp’s play blends campus drama, love story and mystery, wrong-footing our expectations throughout. Intensely moving without recourse to sentiment, like the literary works referenced in the script, in the end this story’s power lies in its moments of silence and ellipsis. To August 25, traverse.co.ukAR
★★★★☆ This smart, sharp one-woman show is from the producing team behind Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, and it looks set to follow the same gilded path as those stage-to-screen phenomena. Like those fringe mega-hits, Weather Girl, written by Brian Watkins and brilliantly performed by Julia McDermott, features the same edgy atmosphere of darkness and growing unease beneath its anti-comic surface.
McDermott plays Stacey, a weather presenter on a small TV station in central California, with an artillery delivery to rival Nicole Kidman in the 1995 film To Die For. Beneath the perfectly coiffed hair and grinning vitality, all is not well. We learn early on that the water bottle she carries contains prosecco, or vodka in extremis. When the rural California heat ignites, and Stacey reports on a house fire that kills an entire family, she sets off on a self-destructive bender, culminating in a woozy encounter with her long-lost mother, who apparently can conjure water from scratch.
Watkins’s script backs a lot into its 60 minutes, from its spot-on parody of vacuous TV news to its blackly satirical take on climate denial. McDermott meets the challenge admirably, creating a character who is undeniably flawed but whose integrity bubbles to the surface. Look out for the inevitable Netflix adaptation. To August 26, summerhall.co.ukAR
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★★★★☆ The word “gentle” could have been invented to describe this music theatre piece from Oliver Emanuel and Gareth Williams, the duo behind The 306: Dawn, about the forgotten voices of the First World War. It opens with a meet-cute between neighbours (Emma Mullen and Christopher Jordan-Marshall) in a Glasgow tenement. He’s depressed after a break-up; she’s at the door to complain about the endless sound of Radiohead shaking the walls. There’s a spark, even if what follows is a classic case of opposites attract. While she likes to travel light, he hoards everything. In this case one woman’s trash really is another man’s treasure.
What unfolds, delicately and with great warmth, is a history of the relationship, told through the many documents, menus, receipts and letters that chronicle their life together, interspersed with significant bits of paper from history. What could have been twee is instead affecting, thanks to the understated script and witty songs, and appealing characterisations from Mullen and Jordan-Marshall, who manage the triple threat of acting and singing while also creating origami sculptures. Tender and at times sad, without being maudlin, it’s a lovely swansong from the prolific Emanuel, who died last year. To August 25, traverse.co.ukAR
★★★☆☆On the way out, I overheard one satisfied punter exclaiming to her companion, “That was unbelievable!” Well, yes, it was, but the reason that David Ireland’s plays divide audiences so much is that he enjoys piling implausibilities on top of each other. Characters are pushed to extremes and beyond; dysfunction and brutality become the norm, each line delivered with a Tarantino-esque flourish.
The performances are impressive in this hallucinogenic two-hander about an alcoholic’s relationship with his well-meaning but somewhat smug sponsor. Jack Lowden, of Slow Horses fame, is all coiled, jittery tension as Luka, the young Scot who is trying to salvage his life. Drink is just one of his problems: he is jobless, a resentful failure with women and struggling with a porn addiction. Sean Gilder plays James, the older ex-boozer who dispenses well-meaning advice.
The problem is that Luka succumbs to a form of religious mania, and hallucinations in which James takes the form of a giant rabbit. Best not try to tease out any logic in the shifting power relationships in this bad dream; all you can do is look out for Ireland’s trademark tics and admire the dynamic between the two actors. Did I feel moved by their plight, though? Not really. To Aug 25, eif.co.ukCDRead the full The Fifth Step review
★★★☆☆The Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra’s trip to the Edinburgh International Festival, the only UK date on their European tour, was certainly big on ambition. They played one of the biggest behemoths of the orchestral repertoire, Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie, but it never really hit the heights, finding the scale and the volume but not enough drama or bite. The conductor Thierry Fischer didn’t summon enough tension out of the opening and the ascent struggled to get its boots on. The climaxes made a lot of noise but they never felt threatening or awestruck, more like a jaunt through the Cotswolds than a soul-shaking Alpine adventure.
Ginastera’s Violin Concerto sounded like the soundtrack to a film noir, full of ominous percussion and threatening brass. Roman Simovic played the solo part with dark focus but, for all of its eerie effects, the orchestral picture felt strangely monochrome, full of emotional angst but not much else. Simovic played Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie with terrific flair, however, wisely keeping the irony to the fore.
Only with Camargo Guarnieri’s Suite Vila Rica did some Brazilian sunshine come out, the sheen on the string playing so bright it would have had you reaching for your shades.ST
★★★✩☆Nothing gets in the way of Kirill Serebrennikov’s determination to drag The Marriage of Figaro into the violent and nasty 21st century. For this Komische Oper Berlin staging, dropped on to the Edinburgh International Festival like a small bomb, the dissident Russian director changes Da Ponte’s libretto, Mozart’s music and even the opera’s usual characters to suit his vision of what’s needed to give a “convention-bound” 18th-century drama a contemporary buzz. Some of this is ingeniously conceived and staged with flair, even if you constantly feel you are watching some dark, depressing movie about the Russian mafia, replete with torture scenes. Richard Morrison Read the full The Marriage of Figaro review
★★★☆☆What an oddity this new, self-described musical parody is. This cheap and acidically cheerful confection is based on Willy’s Chocolate Experience, the infamous family-aimed immersive rip-off in Glasgow that lasted one day earlier this year, and garnered global attention after a meme of “sad Oompa Loompa” Kirsty Paterson went viral. Andy Fickman’s off-the-cuff staging is constructed around Paterson who, in a curious act of revenge or self-exploitation, is playing herself.
Alas, she hasn’t much to do except stand on the sidelines moaning morosely. The rest of the ten-strong ensemble work like gangbusters, delivering a stream of jovially cynical tunes. The standout is Eric Petersen, a vocal powerhouse relishing every moment as the unscrupulous Willy Wonka-esque impresario behind it all.
Lodged inside this unabashedly self-referential show’s hyperactive tongue-in-cheek style are some mildly intriguing notions about how easily and avidly contemporary culture feeds off itself. Hard to believe, though, that the post-Fringe goal is to take it to the West End or Broadway. There is pacey fun to be had here, but no golden ticket. To August 26, pleasance.co.ukDonald Hutera
★★★☆☆The phrase “this one could run and run” is often heard in the context of theatre, but not usually to describe a single scene. The latest show from Tim Etchells, the artistic director of Sheffield-based company Forced Entertainment, mines a single incident ­— a waiter overfilling a customer’s glass in a restaurant — ad nauseam, to the point of helpless hilarity or mounting impatience, depending on your perspective.
Indeed, the stripped-back piece, performed and co-devised by Bert and Nasi (Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas, winners of the Forced Entertainment award) features a preamble so well timed and engaging that the rest is bound to become a matter of diminishing returns. It is an ingenious touch to tell an audience exactly what is going to happen, and then keep us in suspense for as long as possible.
There is undeniable trepidation in watching the sequence unfold in its manifold forms. At what point will the customer notice the wine is overflowing? How will the waiter react? Shifts between versions can be subtle or expansive, and contrasts emerge between Bert’s faux-naïf style and Nasi’s tendency to boil over. As visual comedy, with no darkness or mystery to it, the piece eventually outstays its welcome. To August 25, summerhall.co.uk
★★★☆☆Two mighty Passions, by Osvaldo Golijov and JS Bach, opened this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, and a third — even rarer — has now been sung in a heroic late-night concert at Usher Hall. Heroic because Passion Week, written in 1911 by the Russian composer Alexander Grechaninov, makes extraordinary demands on, particularly, an amateur chorus.
You need super-deep basses for a start, often required to sing the B flat below the stave and at one point even the A. Then there’s the rich harmonies, much richer than in Rachmaninov’s Vespers, which is the obvious comparison. They are similarly based on Russian Orthodox chants but flavoured with Wagnerian chromaticism and often flaring into 10 or 12 parts. Finally there’s the length: nearly an hour of unaccompanied singing meditating on Christ’s Crucifixion.
I won’t say everything was perfect about the Edinburgh Festival Chorus’s performance under James Grossmith’s direction. The tuning was uncomfortable at times and those deep bass notes were more felt than heard. But the two soloists (Zsuzsana Cerveni, David Lee) both had the right sort of plangent voices to intone the priest-like litanies. And when the choir really opened out, the fortissimo sound was glorious.
I came to this Russian choral epic straight from hearing cool, slinky, Brazilian pop improvisations played by the strings of an excellent collective based in Sao Paulo called Ilumina. A jolting contrast, yes, but indicative of how global the festival’s music programme now feels under Nicola Benedetti’s direction. And audiences seem to love it.RM
★★★☆☆Scottish Dance Theatre’s new double bill is a spirited showcase for the company’s nine dancers. They throw themselves into their work with plenty of energy and skill.
Neither of the dances, each created by an up-and-coming female European choreographer, is groundbreaking or particularly innovative. They are, however, more than serviceable examples of the kind of rousing contemporary ensemble dance that SDT can deliver.
Given the title it is no surprise that Roser López Espinosa’s The Flock was inspired by bird migrations and the human desire to fly. Dancers, casually clad in dark blue and grey, ready themselves to take off. Heads are down. Arms swing out to the sides. The pace builds, rising from the mechanical to something approaching ecstasy.
A curious lull ensues, all the dancers dropping to the floor as if in a collective hibernatory sleep. Gradually they reawaken, regather and swoop swiftly from corner to corner in an effective simulation of flickering patterns.
Sofia Nappi’s Moving Cloud is a wild party piece set to contemporary spins on traditional Celtic music by the Glaswegian folk fusion group TRIP and the composer Donald Shaw. (The band plays live August 16-17.)
Here dancers in vague, billowing period garb ooze and wriggle about like poseurs high on their juicy vibe. The movement veers from manic, jazzy playfulness to temporary slouches and slumps. It all seems fairly chaotic, and the volume level of the soundtrack is far too high, but this relatively brief work exudes a crowd-pleasing geniality. To August 25, tickets.edfringe.com; touring September 3-28
★★★☆☆This duet by the Nigeria-born Irish choreographer Mufutau Yusuf is one of the stronger of the eight productions that began their Fringe runs this week at Dance Base. The hour-long work is described as “an attempt to understand the politics of the Black body in contemporary Western society, interrogating notions of representation and misrepresentation”. That may sound dry but, luckily, Yusuf is a physical artist rather than a theorist. The performance is challenging, sometimes patience-testing, but the forceful dancing and striking, symbolic stage imagery maintain our attention.
The backdrop is a panoramic, iceberg-like wall of crumpled white paper. In front, a tapering tower mainly of plaid plastic storage bags. Slowly this structure begins to move, the figure inside capering about. After a blackout two men (Yusuf, naked, and Kennedy Junior Muntanga) appear in a series of tableaux accompanied by loud, earthquake-style rumbling and tearing. Their behaviour is fittingly alarmed, distressed. For a long time we never see their faces. Eventually, both are clothed and commence jogging, in varied spatial patterns, to a propulsive beat. All of this is open to interpretation. By the end, however, a measure of joyous kinetic amplitude is reached and begins to seep through from them to us. To August 25, dancebase.co.uk; also at Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, November 14-15DH
★★★☆☆The last time the Leicester-based dancer Aakash Odedra performed at the Edinburgh International Festival he was in tandem with the Chinese dancer Hu Shenyuan. Inspired by a classic Chinese novel and Buddhist philosophy, their production Samsara was sublime. Now, two years on, Odedra is back at the festival in the world premiere of a solo derived from an ancient Sufi myth. The relative simplicity of this metaphorical tale — which Odedra has said parallels his ideas about being on stage — means that every detail and moment of the production must ring with nuanced clarity. The choreographer Rani Khanam, an experienced performer of the Indian classical dance form kathak, has done a creditable job of fashioning a fluid showcase for Odedra’s skills.DHRead the full Songs of the Bulbul review
★★★☆☆Welcome to the Sixties … the 1560s! Fresh off the boat from France, Mary, the returning queen (Mhairi McCall), is getting ready to wow her subjects to a thrilling rock soundtrack. She’s flanked by an entourage of kilted rock chicks and has a new album in the works, so the stage is set for a magnificent comeback. Yet, all is not well. John Knox (Cameron Banks), head of Presbyterian Records, is no fan of the upstart in the flaming fright wig. “Why can we not have a man queen?” he wails.
All the main characters are present and correct in Pretty Knickers’s musical twist on Scottish history. Elizabeth R (Nicola Alexander) is recast as a Swiftian pop princess; Bothwell (Niamh Kinane) works the look of Johnny Rotten and the voice of Adele; Darnley (Sarah Dingwall) gets crushed to death by a piano. Like Six, the musical about Henry VIII’s wives, it’s unlikely that this show, written by McCall with Cal Ferguson and Lewis Lauder, and directed by Lana Pheutan, would work so well if the songs weren’t so infectious, the five-piece band so tight, the blend of voices so fabulous.
The staging, on the other hand, seems an afterthought, with some awkwardness in the gaps between scenes and an insipid mise en scène. With a little more attention paid on design and choreography, this one could run and run. To August 25, edfringe.comAR
★★★☆☆Three legendary comedians walk into a dressing room. That might be the start of a joke, but it is also the premise for this nostalgic play, written and directed by Paul Hendy. The funny men in question are Tommy Cooper, Bob Monkhouse and Eric Morecambe, impersonated with such uncanny attention to detail by Damian Williams, Simon Cartwright and Bob Golding, that it comes as something of a jolt when a photograph of the real Tommy Cooper arrives on stage at the end.
As these stalwarts of the British light entertainment scene get ready for curtain up, they share banter, pull apart their most famous routines, and indulge in good-natured rivalry. A photo wall of their comic forebears — Arthur Askey, George Formby, Tony Hancock — inspires further impersonation and a couple of musical numbers. There are meditations on the craft of joke-making, and the misfortunes of dying onstage, blackly foreshadowing Cooper’s impending fate.
All of this makes for a gentle, meandering piece that eschews drama or complexity. (That the only women referenced here are Cooper’s wife and his assistant, with whom he was having an affair, is glossed over completely.) Still, it’s hard not to be engaged by the classic gags, delivered with inch-perfect comic timing by the cast. To August 25, assemblyfestival.comAR
★★★☆☆Come Dine with Me, the TV show where amateur chefs invite unfamiliar competitors into their homes for a dinner party is, in many ways, the perfect recipe. Overly confident contestants serve up culinary flops and are then scored, savagely, in secret. What’s not to like?
It is a fine delicacy of British TV. The best thing about it? Obviously the narrator, Dave Lamb — a glaring and unfortunate absence from this musical by Sam Norman and Aaron King.
It might not have the final garnishes of the TV version, but Come Dine with Me: The Musical is still spiced with spirit, fun and games. In the story we’ve reached the 1,000th episode and viewing figures have taken a beating. So a glossy TV producer (Danielle Coombe) and her team set out to make the best show there’s been. All they need are guests, desperate to win, whatever the cost.
This musical is a predictable whodunnit search to find the person sabotaging everyone else’s evenings. The whole thing is crushingly cheesy with even a love story thrown in for good measure. And of course there’s some apt food-related innuendo: “I have trouble staying firm” is a particular highlight. It doesn’t have a winning menu and its flavours are far from subtle. But if you fancy watching a breezy gastronomic battle, this will more than satisfy your cravings. To August 25, underbellyedinburgh.co.ukAR
★★★☆☆Adam Riches, the winner of the 2011 Edinburgh Comedy Award, is best known for his brilliant caricature of the actor Sean Bean. On the face of it, the subject of his new show — Jimmy Connors, the five-time US Open-winning tennis star — couldn’t be more of a contrast to the hard-bitten Yorkshireman.
Riches’s performance is no less intense, however. Over an hour, in an already sweltering venue, he’s required to cover the court, volley and chip-and-charge almost continuously. “I have to do this for a month?” he wails, in a rare moment of breaking character.
From the strains of Toto’s Hold the Line that greet us as we enter, we might be back in Connors’s Seventies heyday. In fact, the setting is the 1991 US Open, when the player was in the middle of a miraculous comeback at the age of 39.
Between games, we hear stories of his upbringing, a blistering coaching regimen at the hands of his mother, and an uncompromising attitude that saw him prioritise the sport above all else.
Riches’s writing is nuanced, with some brilliant turns of phrase (McEnroe is described as the “gasoline” to Connors’s “fire”), and if there are a couple of unnecessary longueurs, notably at the outset, the writer-performer succeeds in stirring sympathy, and even affection for the battling alpha athlete. To August 26, summerhall.co.uk Allan Radcliffe
★★★☆☆Aesthetics are at the fore in the Australian choreographer Lewis Major’s serious-minded mixed bill Triptych. It opens with a quick, dynamically elegant trio (by the UK’s Russell Maliphant) in which dancers, each occupying a square of light, use their arms like air-slicing blades.
Then Fausto Brusamolino’s remarkable lighting and visual designs are the star feature. Here a cast of four ripple, ooze and swirl in a gorgeous, seemingly subaquatic digital environment that shifts into something resembling super-charged television static.
The epilogue is in two parts: a strenuous yet rapturous duet set to a Corsican male chorale, and a self-indulgent solo (keyed to reconfigured Debussy) in which a female dancer sheds clouds of powder as she spirals on the bare stage.
The second work Lien, meanwhile, is a friendly, gift-like brief encounter between one dancer and one lucky punter that happens just four times a day. A balm amid the Fringe hubbub. To August 25, assemblyfestival.comDH
★★★☆☆ Among the many heroic figures of Greek mythology, Penthesilea has been consigned to footnote status. This seems all the more unfair when you consider that, according to some versions of the story, this Queen of the Amazons captured the heart of the god-like warrior Achilles in the midst of the Trojan war.
Eline Arbo’s production for the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam provides a suitably epic, highly wrought and bloodthirsty take on the warrior queen. The show, in Dutch with English surtitles, is based on the 1808 tragedy by the German playwright Heinrich von Kleist, but its aesthetic lies somewhere between punk and New Wave. A cast of nine doubles as musicians, their instruments descending from on high for renditions of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control and gorgeous original compositions by Thijs van Vuure, the musical director. The monochrome of Alva Brosten’s costume design is only occasionally broken by great handfuls of bright-red blood.
What Arbo’s production misses at times, amid the spectacle and energetic set pieces, is a more nuanced approach to character, with the real people beneath the armour only briefly glimpsed in a moving love scene. This nonetheless makes for an enjoyable show — larger-than-life, self-consciously beautiful, camp, silly at times, and shot through with an invigorating queer energy. To August 6, eif.co.ukAllan Radcliffe
★★★☆☆
Amy Liptrot’s bestselling memoir The Outrun about living life on the edge becomes an ethereal vision in Stef Smith’s stage adaptation. From her Orkney birthplace, a young woman journeys to Edinburgh for university and then to London, longing to experience life’s all. Her nights are spent dancing under strobe lights and letting go of inhibitions, but soon hedonism blurs into a darker maelstrom of alcoholism.
Booze is her trusty companion, spinning her world into dangerous technicolour. She loses friends, jobs, her health and great loves. Memories of lonely Orkney hang in the background with Vicky Featherstone’s production making the savage landscape a relentless shadow. As the central woman, Isis Hainsworth is wild and unruly: she is desperate to escape her beginnings, eager to find her place. And yet, she is rooted to Orkney.
• Amy Liptrot on the The Outrun coming to the stage and big screen
A chorus hum eerily in moments of tension, their words echoing like a dream. The designer Milla Clarke makes the stage dance with immediate feeling: colour dims in moments of isolation, then, green and blue at the point of rebirth. The natural undertones should make The Outrun feel immense. But there’s an emptiness to the later scenes in Papa Westray, Scotland. Featherstone’s vision starts to feel stylistic rather than impactful in this overstretched staging. We’re left waiting for the end point, rather than searching for more. To August 24, lyceum.org.ukAR
★★★☆☆Live, onstage cooking is hardly a novelty at the Fringe, but it would be difficult to match the feast for the senses that is Hannah Khalil’s one-woman play, in which an Iranian woman exiled in London seeks solace in the recipes of her childhood. The smell and vibrant colours of red onions, turmeric, saffron and herbs hit as you walk in, lined up in abundant heaps on the kitchen counter.
Over the coming hour we watch our host (played by Isabella Nefar) attempt Ash Reshteh, a classic Persian noodle soup. As she fully admits, her version could never live up to her mother’s. Having carefully soaked the lentils and saffron, she gleefully admits to using tinned chickpeas and noodles from the Chinese supermarket.
Khalil’s play, adapted from a story by Atoosa Sepehr, weaves scenes from its protagonist’s past, including fleeing an abusive marriage, into the cookery demonstration, at times powerfully, occasionally awkwardly, with passages of movement distracting from, rather than illuminating the story. Nefar’s performance is charming, though, and her character’s loving attempt to reconnect with her homeland through cooking is never less than fascinating. To August 25, traverse.co.ukAllan Radcliffe
★★☆☆☆There’s an alluring story of Hollywood fame and glamour lurking somewhere here. It’s just a pity that the Californian singer Victoria Mature’s portrait of her father, the leading man Victor Mature, manages to turn his life into a humdrum series of anecdotes and half-hearted singalongs.
You have to be of a certain age to remember the films. The man himself seems to have had a modest view of his talent but, although Samson and Delilah is a vintage slab of Cecil B DeMille kitsch, he certainly didn’t disgrace himself as Henry Fonda’s co-star in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine.
We never really learn much about him in this show. His daughter, a classically trained performer, introduces a few clips in which she is cleverly inserted alongside him, in the style of Steve Martin’s film noir spoof Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. But the storytelling is perfunctory and it seems odd that so much time is allotted to Mature’s operatic voice (accompanied by recorded piano) which, in a room as intimate as this, can be overpowering.
Along the way, we get tantalising hints that father and daughter had a less than ideal relationship. Glimpses, too, of a lost world of entertainment. I wasn’t aware that Mature Sr appeared in the original production of the ambitious Kurt Weill–Ira Gershwin psycho-musical Lady in the Dark. And I loved his self-deprecating riposte to the country club that turned down his application for membership on the grounds that actors were not eligible: “I’m not an actor and I have 64 films to prove it.” Bravo. To August 25, edfringe.com
★★☆☆☆The white box stationed outside Edinburgh’s bustling Summerhall looks innocent enough. Inside the serene-seeming container is a world of flying bullets, political assassinations and car chases. More than once in the preamble we are advised that we can still change our minds, that it’s not too late to turn back.
Arcade is the latest multisensory experience from the immersive theatre company Darkfield, due to premiere in 2023 but postponed for technical reasons. The set-up here is of an Eighties-style amusement arcade, with participants arranged in rows before a bank of monolithic video games. In the style of a choose-your-own-adventure scenario, each stage in the journey is determined by the press of a button.
The experience takes place in absolute darkness, with plot and instructions relayed through headphones. Where one choice takes you through a door into a rousing party, complete with the smell of perfume and chinking glasses, another will end in your being shot at and feeling the bullet whizz past your cheek. It is a heady blend, but its visceral thrills completely overwhelm any character or story. Such technical wizardry is all very well, but there are plenty of headset-based shows at the fringe that also inspire a wealth of emotional engagement. To August 26, summerhall.co.ukAllan Radcliffe
★★☆☆☆Historically derived pop musicals remain hot stuff in the wake of Hamilton and Six. The Queen of the Nile gets an EDM-fuelled makeover in this late-night, low-budget immersive extravaganza — an off-Broadway import with music and lyrics by Jeff Daye and Laura Kleinbaum.
It charts the decidedly bumpy affair between Cleopatra (Emilie Louise Israel, who grows in stature as the show progresses) and Mark Antony (Marcellus Whyte, commanding and cocky). Cleopatra’s love life and political manoeuvres are both further complicated by her close relationship with Becky Sanneh’s loyal adviser, Iris, and the bitchy intrusion of Harry’s Singh’s Roman bigwig Octavian.
The storyline is never entirely coherent, however, despite the flitting presence of a perky emcee (River Medway, a former contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK). Suffice to say that our central couple are caught up in potentially treacherous games of power and love, most of which are reduced to high-energy belters and a few ballads.
The score is workable rather than memorable. The leads have strong voices, particularly Whyte. And the director, Christopher D Clegg, pushes the campy party vibe with mixed results. A lot depends on how up for it the audience is — so-so at best on the weeknight I attended. A gyrating ensemble of six do their damnedest to keep things on the boil. In the end, it all adds up to reasonably agreeable but forgettable fun. To August 25, assemblyfestival.comDH
★★☆☆☆The search for The One can be an elongated and complicated journey. In Todd Almond’s musical love story, he literally has to descend a seemingly never-ending flight of stairs to get his romantic shot. On the way down from his apartment he meets several neighbours who each give him a blast of life advice. But could all these distracting conversations just be a means of him avoiding his feelings?
There is an intimate feel to Almond’s performance, which he shares as he sits at a piano stool and looks mischievously out into the audience. Accompanying him is a harpist, Erin Hill, and a bassist, Luke McCrosson, who take the form of secondary characters ranging from the “sexy beast” downstairs neighbour to a woman eager to sign him up to a pyramid scheme. Loosely based on the Odyssey, time feels unsatisfyingly hazy. Does his voyage last a day? A week? A year? Or a lifetime?
It is a frustrating ambiguity that makes Almond’s catalogue of songs seem uneven. He is, undoubtedly, a fine performer. But with music that is regrettably too similar, the distinct sections of his play start to mesh. “I’m almost there,” he exclaims, finally — but is anyone actually sure where this is heading? To Aug 26, festival24.summerhall.co.ukAR
★★☆☆☆
Max and Stevie are just two guys trying to survive the jungle of a Scottish secondary school. But, they have a problem: Max is still a VL. What’s a VL, you’re wondering? The label nobody wants, of course: Virgin Lips. Basically, he’s never been kissed.
In Gary McNair and Kieran Hurley’s follow-up to their 2018 hit Square Go, the two teen characters discuss the politics of the playground and their plot to solve Max’s big issue. But while there are flashes of hilarity in the script that indulges in teenage angst, their conversation rolls around agonisingly in circles.
They list potential kissing options: there’s a French teacher and a girl who, rumour has it, has had sexual relations with ghosts. But the play only starts to become meaningful later, with references to the lines of consent and the need to hide sexuality.
Max and Stevie are endearing, suitably naive characters who could win over any audience with their boyish charms. But their personalities alone are not enough to warrant this disappointing second stage outing. To August 26, festival24.summerhall.co.ukAR
★★☆☆☆
Filing into the venue, we are handed slips of paper and asked to write something we know, or think we know, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It feels like a warm-up to the real business of this drama from Floating Shed — an Israeli-Palestinian-British company — which asks its audience to question our assumptions and biases and recognise the humanity behind the headlines.
Written by Nadav Burstein, and based on his experiences, the show follows four conscripts to the Israel Defence Forces, waiting out their three-year engagement, but with differing attitudes towards the conflict. While Osher (Tarik Badwan), of Jewish and Arab heritage, and Omri (Burstein) have been pushed by their experience to the brink of suicide, Yonatan (Tom Dalrymple), has become inured to bloodshed. Meanwhile, Adam (Harvey Schorah) channels his anger into peace activism.
Earnest and well-intentioned, the play’s dramatic impact is hampered by a restrained, rather listless staging, its lengthy scenes of characters sitting around talking only occasionally broken up by expositional voiceover or forays into Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. With pace and variety, this timely material would have more power, but it’s dramatically underwhelming in its present form. To August 26, pleasance.co.ukAllan Radcliffe
★★☆☆☆
“A musical about a ski accident, who would have thought of that?” Well, actually more people than you might think. This is the second musical about Gwyneth Paltrow’s infamous court case I’ve seen this year. And also the second time I’ve left the theatre wondering: is there really enough content in this bizarre frenzy to warrant an all-singing and dancing adaptation?
Roger Dipper and Rick Pearson clearly think so. They’ve bulked out Paltrow’s trial against a Utah optometrist with brassy and unnecessary tunes about Taylor Swift, enjoyable filler riffs on the musical Chicago and references to viral pop culture moments. But with basically no material to rely on, the show would need to be extremely funny, or at least extremely camp, for it to be hoot.
Spoiler: it’s neither. The same jokes are recycled — we get it, Paltrow made a candle that smells like a vagina. There are some glittery dance numbers by Arlene Phillips and as Paltrow, Diana Vickers aptly channels celeb health guru. But most of the time the actors look aimless on a set designed by David Shields that looks like it could have been drawn with a fine liner. I’ll need more than a wellness treatment after this. To August 26, underbellyedinburgh.co.ukAR
★☆☆☆☆I’m not a gamer. But how even the staunchest player could leave feeling any scrap of enjoyment after this slapdash VR musical is beyond me. The premise is simple: four unknowing audience members are invited onto the stage by the writer-performer Ben Bradley and asked to put on VR headsets to step into another dimension. The rest of us sit, basically twiddling our thumbs, while they play.
The game, which isn’t particularly visually impressive, is projected onto all four walls of the theatre, and we scan a QR code which leads us to a website that apparently, “controls” the game. Littered with robotic-sounding songs, there is no jeopardy and even less plot in this atrocious simulated adventure. “Let’s take off the headsets if they’re not serving us,” Bradley says. Sadly, it comes about an hour too late.
I’d find it tedious watching someone play a video game in my normal life. But I certainly don’t want to watch it on stage. Granted, there were some technical issues the night I saw it and Bradley declares it is “basically the worst show they’ve ever done”. But there would need to be a creative transplant to get me to waste another 60 minutes in this digital disaster. To Aug 26, zoofestival.co.ukAR
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