Edinburgh Festival
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 ...
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 ...
David Kettle
Who’d have thought a play about a homophobic hate crime could be so much fun? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a little. But there are certainly lighter moments in La reprise, provocative Swiss-born director Milo Rau’s production with his International Institute of Political Murder at the International Festival, which investigates the torture and killing of 32-year-old Ihsane Jarfi in Liège in 2012.In fact, it’s Rau and his ensemble’s careful judging and pacing of mood that make La reprise so effective, and so memorable too. From its disarmingly jokey opening – complete with barbed Read more ...
David Kettle
You can’t question Javaad Alipoor’s ambition. Ancient Mesopotamian empires, geological layers of chicken bones, the half-life of polysterene cups, Thomas Gainsborough, Susan Sontag, Iranian political history, gold iPhones, mallwave – all that and plenty more gets crammed into the mere hour of his breathless Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran at the Traverse. And that’s even without mentioning the wordy narration, video projections, Instagram feeds, live video and multipanelled set he employs to get his ideas across.It all leaves you more than a bit bewildered. And indeed, if Read more ...
David Kettle
Below the Blanket ★★★★ There’s a deep vein of melancholy running through Glasgow producing house Cryptic’s promenade installation Below the Blanket, which currently occupies several sites across Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden. Bringing together the work of a clutch of artists, and blurring boundaries between the sonic and the visual (a fertile hinterland that Cryptic has made very much its own), Below the Blanket is inspired by northern Scotland’s Flow Country, a spellbinding and little-known landscape stretching across Caithness and Sutherland. Not only a vital environment Read more ...
David Kettle
Enough ★★★★ Immaculately turned out in winning smiles, navy and nylon, cabin crew Jane and Toni dispense comforting reassurance and flirty glances to passengers at 30,000 feet. Down on the ground, though, they’re juggling kids, kitchen colour-schemes and semi-rapist boyfriends. And what’s that age-old rumble coming from deep in the ground?Stef Smith’s quietly epic new two-hander at the Traverse might begin as a chucklesome comedy about staying calm, controlled and sexy a mile high in the air. But it ends as a guttural howl of fury and despair – at ancient grievances re- Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Since time immemorial the Edinburgh International Festival has started with a juicy choral epic designed to show off the Festival Chorus and the opulent Usher Hall. So this performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony would normally have been billed as the opening concert. But the forces of democratisation and outreach have been at work. In recent years the festival has kicked off with a large scale free “opening event,” aptly mirrored by the popular free fireworks concert at the end.This year the grand opening event was in fact a concert on Friday evening by the very same orchestra as that Read more ...
David Kettle
Of the Edinburgh International Festival’s three productions by 2018’s resident company, Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, The Prisoner is the most gnomic, the most baffling, and, frankly, the most disappointing. Which is a great shame, of course, because it is also the one possibly most hotly anticipated, being co-written and co-directed by the Bouffes du Nord’s guiding light across several decades: the legendary elder statesman of the theatre Peter Brook who, astonishingly, is 93.We’re in an unnamed foreign land – judging by the sun-scorched trees, dusty rocks and heat- Read more ...
David Kettle
Home ★★★★ Philadelphia-based theatre artist Geoff Sobelle has scored highly with two previous Edinburgh Fringe shows. Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, way back in 2010, imagined the natural world wreaking ruthless vengeance on the mundanity of modern business in bizarre visual spectacles, while the smaller-scale The Object Lesson in 2014 was a more reflective work on objects and memory, with a jaw-dropping magic trick as its poignant conclusion.Home is Sobelle’s debut at the International Festival, and his most ambitious Edinburgh offering to date, presenting Read more ...
David Kettle
The Edinburgh International Festival scored quite a coup in securing the services of Bernstein protégée Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on the very day of the great composer/conductor’s centenary – and for the festival’s penultimate concert of 2018. And with local legend Nicola Benedetti as violin soloist, there was an understandably expectant, almost carnival atmosphere in the packed Usher Hall. What we got, however, was a concert that was far more restrained – at times puzzlingly so – but more thoughtful, too.The most fun of the evening came in the form of four miniature Read more ...
David Kettle
There were two immediate casualties at Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s high-energy account of Messiaen’s monumental Des canyons aux étoiles… with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival.First was one of the strings in the Usher Hall’s Steinway grand, which finally gave way during the piece’s eighth movement. Well, it had been given really quite a pounding by Aimard, and went on to emit a prepared piano-like buzzing rattle until the end of the piece. Second – less crucially – was the handle of the percussion section’s wind machine, cranked so furiously to conjure Read more ...
David Kettle
La maladie de la mort ★★★ Toxic masculinity in all its appalling variety is a hot topic across Edinburgh’s festivals this year – just check out Daughter at CanadaHub and even Ulster American at the Traverse for two particularly fine and shocking examinations.But few works can provide quite as clinical and uncompromising a dissection of the male gaze as the International Festival’s La maladie de la mort, written by Alice Birch and directed by Katie Mitchell, based on the 1982 novella by Marguerite Duras, and one third of the residency from Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Read more ...