Theatre
Helen Hawkins
One of the great wonders of Western literary history is one of the earliest, Homer’s The Odyssey, an epic poem with all the thrills and spills of an Indiana Jones outing, with added Olympians. The National’s version turned out not to be The Odyssey as we know it, though. Billed as a “new play” by Chris Bush, with music by Jim Fortune, it was the fifth instalment of a Public Acts project, following the massed efforts of four amateur groups across the country – in Stoke, Sunderland, Doncaster and Trowbridge – which performed a different section of the story each, from four Read more ...
David Kettle
CHOO CHOO! (Or... Have You Ever Thought About ****** **** *****? (Cos I Have)), Pleasance Dome ★★★★Nye and Duncan seem to live a charmed life. Clad in primary-coloured dungarees, they begin their days with a song, and see what adventures the radio has in store for them. Maybe today they’ll be play-acting a game show, or recreating a famous movie scene. Anything to fill the time. Most importantly, they’re counting the days until their holiday. Well, Duncan is.There are a lot of laughs to be had at new company StammerMouth’s slightly sinister send-up of children’s entertainers, but Read more ...
aleks.sierz
This is a play about censorship in a totalitarian state – but, no, I’m not reviewing The Pillowman again. Instead, I’m watching A Mirror by Sam Holcroft, a playwright who – as her 2015 play Rules for Living amply illustrated – is interested in playful games with the idea of theatricality.This time, she explores ideas about fact and fiction in a tricksy story set in a repressive regime whose Almeida Theatre production stars the always watchable, and highly bankable, Jonny Lee Miller.The plot is about Mr Čelik (Miller), director of the Ministry of Culture in a dystopian no-place, whose job is Read more ...
David Kettle
Distant Memories of the Near Future, Summerhall ★★★★About three decades into the future, love has been "solved" – with (what else?) an algorithm, and a healthy splash of AI. It’s so successful, in fact, that states worldwide officially mandate computer-generated coupledom because of its benefits for productivity and consumption. Heaven help you if you’re one of the rare undesirables, unmatchable with another by the ubiquitous Q-PID app. Meanwhile, all the flowers have disappeared, asteroids are being mined for their rare minerals (now exhausted on Earth), and a compulsary daily 10- Read more ...
David Kettle
Dark Noon, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★★If there’s a more ambitious theatre production than Dark Noon at the Fringe this year, I’ve yet to see it. That’s ambitious in terms of its staging: during the course of the show’s 100 minutes (yes, it’s a proper, full-length production), virtually an entire town is constructed on a bare red-earth stage right before our eyes. But it’s also ambitious in terms of its themes and subject matter. This is the history of the Wild West, the great American push to the Pacific, frontier pioneers, gold rushes and the law of the gun. It’s a world of corruption Read more ...
David Kettle
The Insider, ZOO Southside ★★★★Uncovered and investigated in 2017, the Cum-Ex scam was a complex tax fraud that stole billions from the coffers of several European countries. Its principal was simple (well, fairly simple): companies would claim tax refunds on dividend payments for shares apparently owned across several territories, and therefore theoretically taxed more than once. The reality, however, was that the shares had simply been loaned, then returned: smart lawyers and accountants had discovered a loophole for claiming back money that had never been paid in the first place. Read more ...
David Kettle
A toy car – in fact, a mobile home with comically enormous antenna on top – shudders over arms and shoulders as if they were mountain ranges. A colossal polar bear comforts its curious cub. A lifesize puppet grandmother is chased up and down stairs by her over-enthusiastic stairlift.There’s a lot of humour, and of exquisite beauty, in this brief, ephemeral collaboration between two Belgian puppetry and mime companies, Focus and Challiwaté, at the International Festival. The overarching narrative – such as it is – involves a trio of characters (maybe reporters, possibly archivers, at least Read more ...
David Kettle
Maureen, House of Oz ★★★★Make yourself comfortable – we’ll be here for a while. That’s what our host, 80-something Maureen, advises us several times during the course of her unhurried, hypnotically vivid reminscences of a life lived to the full. The era-defining, population-shifting changes she’s witnessed across her home neighbourhood of King’s Cross, Sydney. The teenage lover who disappeared into the turmoil of World War Two and returned changed forever. The soulmate whose death celebrations she staged with exquisite care. The little black book in which she records the dates of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes. Two sisters (young, educated, attractive) bicker with each other. But for the pre-World War One era, they are not young, educated or attractive enough to acquire a gentleman for a husband, their only route out of a long, slow future of the same day repeating for decades. Things might change if the flirtations of man-on-the-make, Mr Smythe, can be converted into something more substantive.Staged in London for the first Read more ...
David Kettle
PLEASE LEAVE (a message), Underbelly, Cowgate ★★★★One of (brilliantly named) London-based theatre collective Clusterflux’s actors sent me a Twitter DM to request a review of their new show: here that review is, a few days later. Yucca Mountain in New Mexico also required a message, this time aimed at generations far into the future, to warn about the radioactive waste buried beneath it. Even Eighties pop icons Berlin and MC Hammer sent out messages into the future, tracks that we can now listen to as cultural artefacts from particular times and places.There’s a lot going on in Read more ...
David Kettle
With its throbbing crowds and its performers baying for attention (and for audiences), the Edinburgh Fringe can be a hectic, raucous place. But for anyone who needs a break from the crammed-full, in-your-face stand-up gigs, thankfully three shows provide far calmer, more intimate experiences – involving just you and one other.At Summerhall, Without Sin (★★★★, until 27 August), created by Dublin-based Unqualified Design Studio, takes the explicit form of a confessional – quite literally, with a specially constructed, two-alcove wooden box nestling on one side of the venue’s courtyard. Enter it Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Forty years ago, the world was very different for gay men. AIDS was devastating their communities, especially in the big cities where hard-won enclaves of acceptance were being hollowed out, one sunken-eyed friend after another. Media screamed “Gay Plague” and some politicians barely suppressed their glee at the “perverts’” comeuppance. Allies were thin on the ground, the redtop press with their finger on the outing trigger never happier than when destroying lives for circulation.Into such a hostile, fearful, vicious world, Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman launched La Cage Aux Folles on Read more ...