Theatre
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 ...
David Kettle
Orpheus ★★★★ This unashamedly sentimental storytelling show got its premiere a couple of years back in the back garden of a cheese shop in Cromarty, before touring the Scottish Highlands, we’re told. With its lo-fi, minimalist aesthetic, which strips theatre right back to its essentials of story and song, Orpheus could pitch up anywhere and charm with its captivating collision of present-day beery nights out and ancient Greek myth.Dave is nearing 30, and only sees the world in shades of grey, until he encounters Eurydice and his life magically transforms to vivid colour Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It feels like Michelle Terry’s first summer season at the Globe has been building up to Emilia for a while now. The theme is Shakespeare and race, so Othello was something of a given. It's joined by The Winter’s Tale, as if the Emilias of these two plays have been waiting for their chance to step into the spotlight. This new work, written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and directed by Nicole Charles, has a lot of potential that it never quite realises.Eponymous heroine Emilia Bassano, who appears at three stages in her long life (Leah Harvey, Vinette Robinson and Clare Perkins), was the first woman Read more ...
Tatty Hennessy
F Off came about off the back of a meeting I had with Paul Roseby, the artistic director of the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. I’d come in to talk to him about my writing and through complete coincidence, someone had just auditioned for Paul with a monologue from one of my plays, so we started talking about me potentially writing something for the NYT.Paul had been interested in putting social media on trial for a while and it was around the time that Mark Zuckerberg was testifying at the US Senate, so a play tackling the rise of social networks seemed like the perfect fit. Not Read more ...
Robert Carsen
In the time of composer John Gay, greed and self-interest were the main motives for life; and his work The Beggar’s Opera is an open critique on the way that society behaved. The work’s opening number sets the tone, basically saying: “we all abuse each other, we all steal from each other, we all want to get as much as we can and to hell with everybody else.”As the story develops we get endless examples of this attitude – particularly from the status quo officials who don’t seem to care where their money is coming from or whether people are innocent, so long as their pockets are lined. Yet Read more ...
David Kettle
Nigel Slater's Toast ★★★★ “It’s impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you,” says Sam Newton’s eager, nine-year-old Nigel, in Henry Filloux-Bennett’s fluent stage adaptation of Nigel Slater’s 2003 memoir. And in Jonnie Riordan’s energetic, elegant production – arriving at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre from Manchester’s Lowry – food quite rightly takes centre stage. In the tempting aromas of cooking that waft out from the stage; in the patisserie treats passed out into the audience; in the walnut whips that taste of a seductive but dangerous adult world.Young Read more ...
David Kettle
Launched just last year to celebrate the country’s 150th anniversary, CanadaHub has quickly become one of the Edinburgh Fringe’s most exciting and intriguing venues, presenting a small but richly provocative programme of work from across that vast country. Here are just three of its offerings this year.Daughter ★★★★ The post-show discussion in CanadaHub’s leafy garden bar following Daughter feels more like group therapy. Well, you might need some reassurance and depressurisation after experiencing the pitch-black whirlwind of Adam Lazarus’s seething solo show.He’s the writer Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The resplendent partnership of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – which produced Disney hits Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – first took root with this 1982 Off-Broadway musical, based on a low-budget Sixties film, about a man seeking love and fortune via a bloodthirsty plant. This revelatory revival from Maria Aberg embraces the work’s B-movie dichotomy: equal parts dark, gory fable and riotous carnival of delights.Orphaned Seymour (Marc Antolin) is nerdy assistant to the Skid Row florist who took him in as a child. He pines after colleague Audrey (Jemima Rooper, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Chekhovian is a rather over-used word when it comes to describing some of the late Brian Friel's best work, but you can see why it might apply to Aristocrats, his 1979 play which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin before becoming a contemporary classic. You can count off the elements that remind you of the Russia master: decaying estates, feckless toffs, wistful longings and missed opportunities. Aristocrats is now revived by Lyndsey Turner, whose previous Friel re-stagings at the Donmar - Faith Healer and Philadelphia, Here I Come! - have all been very successful. And she has already Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I’m still not entirely sure what the full associations of the title of New York playwright Jordan Seavey’s new play – its second element, at least: the first speaks for itself – may be, but with writing this accomplished any such uncertainties fall away. Homos, or Everyone in America powerfully combines smart wit and smarting pain, and its inherent energy comes across beautifully in a production from Josh Seymour that positively fizzes (this is the play’s European premiere, after an acclaimed Off Broadway debut two years ago).You might think that Seavey is being equally elliptical about his Read more ...
David Kettle
Underground Railroad Game ★★★★★ The game of the show’s title is a fun educational exercise on the US Civil War devised by Teacher Caroline and Teacher Stuart at Hanover Middle School, with the aim of bringing alive the flight of slaves from the south to the north. Can the kids playing Unionist soliders move the slave dolls between the school’s safe-house boxes, without the fugitives being captured by the Confederates?The title also refers, perhaps, the far more adult games taking place between the two teachers as they play out their (or, perhaps more correctly, Teacher Stuart’ Read more ...
David Kettle
Coriolanus Vanishes ★★★★ Writer and director David Leddy was himself the original solo performer in his Coriolanus Vanishes when it premiered in Glasgow in 2017. But in this powerful, visually stunning outing as part of the Traverse’s very strong festival programme this year, its actor is Irene Allan. It’s a change of gender that casts the work in an entirely new light (and in fact, you can’t help but imagine Leddy’s fragmented monologue from a male perspective), but one that simultaneously changes nothing.As with so much of his work, Leddy’s Coriolanus Vanishes dovetails the Read more ...