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 ...

Josie Long The Stand ★★★★ It has been five years since Josie Long performed a full run at the Fringe, and in the meantime she has experienced a momentous event. She has had a daughter – whom she welcomed into the world, she tells us, with an impassioned speech about how it’s all gone to hell in a handcart, with a Tory Prime Minister and the climate-change emergency threatening to end the world before the wee one reaches adulthood.Of course she didn’t, but such are Long’s woke left-wing credentials that you could believe that she would.Her new show, Tender, is largely about pregnancy and Read more ...

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 ...

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 ...

 Ciaran Dowd ***At the Fringe last year, Ciaran Dowd won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer for his show Don Rodolfo. Now he’s back with the follow-up, Padre Rodolfo. In this tall tale Don Rodolfo has stopped being the guy who puts “ass” into “assassin” and has found God. Rodolfo, using storytelling, mime and song, tells us how he has reached this point, how the Pope called him to Rome to attend a seminary. It was big change in his life, he says: “A lot more reading, a lot less rimming.”He was sorely tested by a nun who was sent to teach him the ways of the cloth. All this Read more ...

A robe can be many things. Sure, it’s a garment, but it can also be cover, a disguise, a costume or a uniform. It’s also something composed of many different threads woven together to create something much bigger. It’s these kinds of layers of multiplicity which form the basis of the inspiration for Scottish composer Alastair White’s new opera, ROBE, premiering at this year’s Tête à Tête opera festival. Scored only for piano, flute and four female voices, the opera creates a layered matrix of worlds within worlds, exploring complex networks between stories, history and experiences.White’s Read more ...

Nothing brings home the difference between sequencing an album and sequencing a live show like going to see a classic album played in its entirety. And Manic Street Preachers’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours – described by frontman James Dean Bradfield in Edinburgh as “a curious mixture of dancing and thinking” – is a stranger choice than most for the live treatment. The five-million-plus selling, multi-award winning album, the 20th anniversary of which the band are currently celebrating, is objectively their biggest release. Look beyond the singles, though, and its songs are arguably Read more ...

“Cult” is probably an over-used adjective, especially when it comes to movies. But there’s undoubtedly something truly special about Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film – about a Texan oil executive on a mission to buy up a section of the Scottish coast for a vast new refinery, only to end up falling in love with the place – that makes it so warmly cherished by certain viewers.Maybe it’s Local Hero’s disarming mix of laid-back whimsy and harder drama, its unapologetic sentimentality, its surreal eccentricity, its gentle humour. Or maybe it’s the movie’s ironic role-reversal, as villagers grow impatient Read more ...

First it was the soft acoustic guitar playing, which on three occasions to three very different audiences won a silence so intense it was almost deafening. Then the loud electric, first heard in Anstruther's Dreel Halls as part of the 2017 East Neuk Festival; the ear-plugs we were given at the door proved unnecessary – just – but the shock of Julia Wolfe's LAD, transferred from nine bagpipes to Sean Shibe live alongside eight recorded selves, was massive.There's more than a touch of creative genius in all this, and as Graham Rickson confirmed in this week’s Classical CDs Roundup on Read more ...

“Well, that was really sweet,” one young audience member in front of me remarked on his way out of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. And yes, there’s no denying that director Wils Wilson’s colourful, psychedelic, summer-of-love-set Twelfth Night, the Lyceum’s season opener in a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, is warm and generous, lovingly crafted, and – yes, touchingly sweet.More interestingly, perhaps, it’s enjoyably playful – and gently provocative, too – in its approach to gender. Shakespeare’s original sets the gender-fluid tone – with Duke Orsino falling for the aloof, recently Read more ...

 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 ...

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 ...