Theatre
David Kettle
Urgent, fast-paced, seemingly never pausing for breath, How Not to Drown is a real-life boy’s own adventure, an appeal for compassion towards refugees, and an interrogation of nationality and identity. That’s quite a mix for a show of 100 minutes. But this bold, confident work, directed with somewhat breathless energy by Neil Bettles for theatre company ThickSkin, pulls it off brilliantly, on a revolving raised platform in Becky Minto’s rugged set. And it’s all the more remarkable because it’s true.Dritan Kastrati grew up in Kosovo, but his parents became increasingly alarmed as war grew ever Read more ...
Marianka Swain
As British summer really kicks in (umbrellas at the ready), our thoughts might turn fondly to the sunny Caribbean. Good timing, then, for the return of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1990 musical set in the French Antilles. Based on Rosa Guy’s novel, it tells a familiar tale of boundary-crossing lovers – The Little Mermaid meets Romeo and Juliet – though with some location-specific details that give it fresh interest.One stormy night, villagers distract a crying child with the story of Ti Moune (Chrissie Bhima, pictured below with Martin Cush), a dark-skinned peasant girl who falls Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s the end of the world as we know it. At least according to Miles, scientist turned messiah, who lost his son in an accident at a frozen lake, and who experienced visions of an impending apocalypse in his subsequent coma.He’s established a colony of believers (let’s not call it a cult) in South America, and we’re here to bear witness to the arrival of his estranged wife, intent on reclaiming their daughter back to civilisation.And it must be so, for it is written in the book, copies of which await us like hymnals when we take our places in the seating circle. The book contains exquisite Read more ...
David Kettle
A fat cat who gobbles up everything in sight. A king who tests his wife’s fidelity with increasingly horrific trials. A man whose flatmate is Poverty. It’s hard to ignore the scathing contemporary resonances in theatre company 1927’s sly, witty new Roots, getting its first European performances at the Edinburgh International Festival.The 1927 team cut their teeth in Edinburgh, way back in 2007 at the Fringe, with the gleefully gruesome Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a succession of miniature tableaux telling of devilish deeds and worrysome characters. Since then, they’ve gone on to Read more ...
David Kettle
Darren McGarvey AKA Loki: Scotland Today The Stand's New Town Theatre ★★★★★ Darren McGarvey (aka Loki the Scottish Rapper) won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2018 for his book Poverty Safari, a startling, sometimes shocking examination of his own roots in deprivation and addiction in Pollok on the south side of Glasgow. The win shot him to stardom overnight, not least for the book’s unflinching dissection of poverty and privilege, and also for McGarvey’s equally uncompromising analysis of his own sometimes ill-considered opinions and perspectives. He Read more ...
David Kettle
Sea Sick CanadaHub ★★★★ She’s not a performer, Alanna Mitchell tells us. She’s a writer and journalist. But what she’s discovered about climate change, and specifically about its effects on the world’s oceans, has compelled her to tell us about it in this show.And it’s Toronto-based Mitchell’s unforced, unperformative directness – just a woman telling us a story, with a blackboard and chalk – that really carries her quietly gripping Sea Sick. That, and the increasingly worrying information she slowly divulges about the state of our seas, and about how that’s going Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On the Other Hand, We’re Happy Summerhall ****This affecting co-production between Paines Plough and Theatr Clywd of Daf James’s play takes a sideways look at adoption.Twentysomethings Abbi (Charlotte Bate) and Josh (Toyin Omari-Kinch) have been together for almost their entire lifetime. They’re solid, so it’s a shock when they can’t have a biological child, and they decide to adopt.The long drawn-out nature of the adoptive process is neatly essayed here, with endless discussion about what kind of child they wish/will be allowed to adopt, and the pitfalls to be avoided. One wrong step and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Following a triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ Superstar, now playing at the Barbican, the Park works its magic on another of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Seventies rock operas. Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down, super-sleek, contemporary take excavates the biting satire of a work sometimes bogged down in period trappings and melodrama, and locates the furious spirit of Eva Perón – portrayed, with unusually convincing youth and fire, by the electrifying American actress Samantha Pauly.Pauly, who starred in the Chicago production of Six, makes a memorable UK debut as the wife of the Read more ...
David Kettle
Deer Woman CanadaHub ★★★ You can feel the fury emanating from the stage in Tara Beagan’s incendiary solo play. Fury at the thousands of Indigenous Canadian women and girls who have gone missing in recent decades, abducted, raped and killed, and often never found (or even looked for). And fury, too, at well-meaning white liberals wringing their hands at such atrocities, yet ultimately doing nothing – like the majority of those in the audience, in fact.It’s a startling, extreme show, delivered in a spellbinding performance by Cherish Violet Blood that seems to dare Read more ...
David Kettle
Physical theatre company Theatre Re are virtually Fringe royalty these days, with a several-year history of fine shows under their belts, plus success internationally and at the London Mime Festival. And judging by their assured and richly resonant Birth this year, they’re just getting better and better – their productions more ambitious, more accomplished and with greater thematic depth.Following last year’s tearjerking take on dementia, The Nature of Forgetting, this year’s offering tackles – well, nothing less than human life itself. Birth follows three generations of women in the same Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Theatre legends die hard. Playwright Philip King, who passed away in 1979, was once hailed as the monarch of the farceurs, and his best-know play, See How They Run (1944), features the immortal line: "Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars!". Like so many legendary lines, this one is not in original text, which actually says: "Sergeant, arrest most of these people!" But never mind, the remarkable thing about his 1970 drama, Go Bang Your Tambourine, is that it has never been seen in London, until now that is, thanks to the advocacy of Two's Company and this fringe venue.The play's title does Read more ...
David Kettle
Chekhov famously pronounced that if you’re going to bring a gun on stage, you’ve got to use it. Is the same true for a chainsaw? To discover the answer, just head along to Meghan Tyler’s wild, over-the-top, gruesome Crocodile Fever at the Traverse Theatre.It’s tempting, in fact, to draw parallels between Crocodile Fever and David Ireland’s brutal but hilarious Ulster American last year, with its rape gags and casual racism. Not that either of those elements appear in this year’s outrageous offering (is a shocking comedy becoming a Traverse Fringe tradition?), but Crocodile Fever shares Read more ...