Edinburgh
David Kettle
Fear of Roses Assembly Roxy ★★★One of the more disconcerting aspects to this year’s Fringe is different venues’ contrasting reactions to the easing of Covid restrictions. Some – like Army @ The Fringe and the Traverse Theatre – maintain limited audience numbers and careful distancing, as well as insisting on mask wearing. The Stand at the Corn Exchange even requires a negative lateral flow test for entry. Others, like Assembly, have performing spaces packed with audience members sitting shoulder to shoulder, and mask wearing apparently voluntary (though there are bars within the Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s always a tricky balance to be struck with site-specific theatre. What’s more important: the show itself, or its unusual setting? And to what extent does its location enrich or even impact on the essence of the text? Edinburgh-based site-specific specialists Grid Iron have been staging shows in parks, pubs and plenty of other unconventional settings for decades. Doppler, however, must surely rank as one of their simplest and most effective marriages of content and location.Doppler is a husband and father, and he lives alone in a forest near Oslo. He’s not sure why: it’s something Read more ...
David Kettle
Tunnels Army @ The Fringe ★★★ As has already been noted, it’s a funny old Fringe this year: only a fraction of its normal size; with audiences that seem either Covid-wary or disconcertingly enthusiastic; with some venues taking advantage of restriction relaxations to open up to jam-packed houses (and infuriating many who’d booked on the basis of social distancing), and others maintaining Covid measures, with outdoor performing spaces and careful hygiene. In short, it’s a bit of a mess, but hey, isn’t that in the spirit of the Fringe? If anything, the smaller programmes in what Read more ...
joe.muggs
Scottish singer-songwriter Dorothy Allison pretty much defines cool. Her band One Dove was the first to snare Andrew Weatherall as producer after his success with Screamadelica, and together they created Morning Dove White: an extraordinary album that fused country and western melancholy with deep dub and electronica. It brought extraordinarily grown up emotion to the rave generation and creating the archetypal comedown soundtrack to the devoted few who loved it.Since then she’s worked with everyone from Massive Attack to Paul Weller, Death In Vegas to Pete Doherty (he used to be talented and Read more ...
graham.rickson
That a film has a cult following doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece, and 1985’s Restless Natives is sweet but ephemeral, a Scottish crime caper that can’t hold a candle to Bill Forsyth’s sparky debut, That Sinking Feeling. Both are set in a period when Scotland’s industrial base was being dismantled, and you could place both films in the same part of the cultural Venn diagram which contains the TV programmes Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Boys From the Blackstuff, the latter’s Bernard Hill having a role here as one protagonist’s father.Directed by Michael Hoffman using a script which had won first Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Seated at the harpsichord, Maxim Emelyanychev introduces this concert in charmingly fractured English. “Hello from Queen’s Hall in Edimbourg, today with chamber group of musicians from Scottish Chamber Orchestra…” But he falters, the camera cuts away, and there follows a mumbled digression on whether the first piece is actually by Hasse, or maybe Richter. Poised with their instruments, the assembled string quintet looks puzzled, and then the music begins, and it’s clear that whatever skill Emelyanychev (pictured below) may lack as an orator is more than outweighed by his skill as a Read more ...
David Nice
Born in exigency at the end of the First World War and soon kiboshed by the Spanish flu, The Soldier’s Tale as originally conceived is a tricky hybrid to bring off. Not so the suite – Stravinsky’s mostly incidental-music numbers are unique and vivid from the off – but the whole story, based on a Russian folk tale about a simple man’s tricky dealings with Old Nick, is awkward, made impossibly complicated and preachy by the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. Huge kudos, then, to a vibrant translation (uncredited, alas) delivered by the Scottish actor Matthew McVarish, spreading himself Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Though live performances are, thankfully, starting to reappear throughout the country, and socially distanced seating, mask-donning and constant hand sanitising becomes the norm for audiences south of the border, those in Scotland are still eagerly anticipating the opportunity to once again be in a concert hall experiencing live music first hand. Thankfully that hasn’t deterred the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from returning to Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall for a series of live streamed chamber concerts. Thursday evening’s focused on French repertoire, with Francis Poulenc’s Sextet, paired with Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Lockdown, perhaps more than any other time, has amplified how modern technology can be both a blessing and a curse. Of course, it’s wonderful to have the means to connect with friends and family scattered across the globe; carry on working, learning, eating, praying etc. with others; and enjoy art in new and innovative ways, such as this particular digital series. But how many of us have felt the exhaustion that comes from back to back zoom meetings, the ennui that comes from barely leaving our homes and the self doubt that comes from others’ social media streams? (Does my garden look as nice Read more ...
Fergus Morgan
If there’s one certainty about the Edinburgh Lyceum’s production of Mrs Puntila And Her Man Matti – and there aren't many in this unsatisfying, overlong revival – it’s that Elaine C Smith makes a terrific drunkard. The Scottish sitcom star, musical veteran and pantomime stalwart plays the erratic millionaire Mrs Puntila in Denise Mina’s re-gendered and relocated take on Brecht's 1948 original, hiring and firing staff with abandon as she totters and teeters, slurs and stumbles around the stage, sinking tumbler after tumbler of whisky. It’s an OTT, unsubtle performance, certainly, but her Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“He was dying slowly. We just made it quick.” This is sharp-faced, menacing Max (Mark Bonnar: Catastrophe, Unforgotten, Line of Duty) to his sensitive brother Jake (Jamie Sives: Chernobyl, Game of Thrones, The James Plays). Jake is driving Max’s car on their way back from a wedding in Fife – Max is beside him, swigging champagne - and accidentally runs into and kills an old man in an Edinburgh suburb. Well, the old guy did have terminal pancreatic cancer, so that makes it OK, doesn’t it?Jake’s all for calling the cops or alerting a neighbour. But no way, says Max, unless he wants "to be Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The conductor Thomas Søndergård turned 50 on Friday. He marked the occasion, which coincided with the opening concert of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s winter season, with a short homily on the contradictions of age – “the young seek experience, adventure and wisdom, the old seek only one thing: youth” – addressed to the audience before a programme of three works whose composers were all in their early twenties at the time of writing: Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Berg’s Seven Early Songs, and Mahler’s First Symphony.It was a bold start to a season that promises rich pickings from the Read more ...