Edinburgh Festival
Royce Vavrek
It was during the 1997 Golden Globe Awards telecast that I first caught a glimpse of the film that would change my life completely. Midway through the ceremony was featured a short clip of a paralysed man telling a young woman, his wife, to go and find another man to make love to. She was to come back to him and tell him about her sexual encounter. “It will feel like we are together,” he says. “Love will keep me alive.” My 13-year-old brain exploded.They were Bess and Jan, the central characters in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Wave; the complexities of their narrative I would fully glean Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To celebrate the 60th birthday of Sir James MacMillan, the Edinburgh International Festival has programmed his music over five concerts, including the Nash Ensemble with Fourteen Little Pictures, the National Youth Choir of Scotland with All the Hills and Vales Along, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Festival Chorus with the cantata Quickening. But the festival’s most unequivocal endorsement of Scotland’s leading composer came on Saturday evening in the Usher Hall, with four large-scale works, including a major world premiere, performed over two concerts in the late afternoon Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Returning to Edinburgh International Festival, Berlin's Komische Oper brought Barrie Kosky’s sumptuous production of Eugene Onegin to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. It’s a production that isn’t trying to do anything overly clever or convey a layered meaning; it’s simple in its grandeur in that it looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, and is faithful to Tchaikovsky’s music and Pushkin’s story.The curtain comes up to reveal a lush green stage, complete with grassy carpet and a rich forest behind, designed by Rebecca Ringst. It is the garden of sisters Olga and Tatyana’s house, and the two girls, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Performing as part of Edinburgh International Festival’s Queen’s Hall series, American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, with Scottish pianist Iain Burnside, performed collections of songs by Schumann, Liszt, Poulenc and Ginastera. Opening with Schumann’s Dichterliebe – 16 songs set to the poetry of German poet Heinrich Heine – Brownlee at once had the audience rapt with his rich, full voice. He wonderfully conveyed the many moods of Schubert’s music and Heine’s words. Though the poetry was written with a heavy dose of irony, the music is for the most part deeply lyrical and romantic, and Read more ...
David Kettle
Urgent, fast-paced, seemingly never pausing for breath, How Not to Drown is a real-life boy’s own adventure, an appeal for compassion towards refugees, and an interrogation of nationality and identity. That’s quite a mix for a show of 100 minutes. But this bold, confident work, directed with somewhat breathless energy by Neil Bettles for theatre company ThickSkin, pulls it off brilliantly, on a revolving raised platform in Becky Minto’s rugged set. And it’s all the more remarkable because it’s true.Dritan Kastrati grew up in Kosovo, but his parents became increasingly alarmed as war grew ever Read more ...
David Kettle
If nothing else, Arabella Weir quips, she can thank her mother for providing the material for her first Fringe show. For Does My Mum Loom Big In This? (see what she did there) is the Fast Show and Two Doors Down actor/comedian’s reflections on motherhood, both her own to her two now twentysomething kids, but more importantly, that of her own mother – posh Scottish, Weir tells us, Oxford-educated, and permanently dissatisfied by the appearance, intellect and achievements of her disappointment of a daughter.So we duly discover the eccentricities of Weir Snr’s behaviour, from moaning about being Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s the end of the world as we know it. At least according to Miles, scientist turned messiah, who lost his son in an accident at a frozen lake, and who experienced visions of an impending apocalypse in his subsequent coma.He’s established a colony of believers (let’s not call it a cult) in South America, and we’re here to bear witness to the arrival of his estranged wife, intent on reclaiming their daughter back to civilisation.And it must be so, for it is written in the book, copies of which await us like hymnals when we take our places in the seating circle. The book contains exquisite Read more ...
David Kettle
A fat cat who gobbles up everything in sight. A king who tests his wife’s fidelity with increasingly horrific trials. A man whose flatmate is Poverty. It’s hard to ignore the scathing contemporary resonances in theatre company 1927’s sly, witty new Roots, getting its first European performances at the Edinburgh International Festival.The 1927 team cut their teeth in Edinburgh, way back in 2007 at the Fringe, with the gleefully gruesome Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a succession of miniature tableaux telling of devilish deeds and worrysome characters. Since then, they’ve gone on to Read more ...
David Kettle
Darren McGarvey AKA Loki: Scotland Today The Stand's New Town Theatre ★★★★★ Darren McGarvey (aka Loki the Scottish Rapper) won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2018 for his book Poverty Safari, a startling, sometimes shocking examination of his own roots in deprivation and addiction in Pollok on the south side of Glasgow. The win shot him to stardom overnight, not least for the book’s unflinching dissection of poverty and privilege, and also for McGarvey’s equally uncompromising analysis of his own sometimes ill-considered opinions and perspectives. He Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
With Peter Gynt, the National Theatre’s “reboot” of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, topping the drama bill at the Edinburgh Festival hotfoot from London, it was almost obligatory to find a space somewhere in the music programme for Grieg’s famous incidental music from 1876. But what would you put in the rest of the programme? A safe choice might have been more Nordic sweetmeats such as the Grieg concerto or a Sibelius symphony, but few could have expected Peer Gynt to be paired with Sofia Gubaidulina’s mesmerising Glorious Percussion – a concerto composed in 2008 for an ensemble of five percussionists and Read more ...
David Kettle
Sea Sick CanadaHub ★★★★ She’s not a performer, Alanna Mitchell tells us. She’s a writer and journalist. But what she’s discovered about climate change, and specifically about its effects on the world’s oceans, has compelled her to tell us about it in this show.And it’s Toronto-based Mitchell’s unforced, unperformative directness – just a woman telling us a story, with a blackboard and chalk – that really carries her quietly gripping Sea Sick. That, and the increasingly worrying information she slowly divulges about the state of our seas, and about how that’s going Read more ...
David Kettle
Deer Woman CanadaHub ★★★ You can feel the fury emanating from the stage in Tara Beagan’s incendiary solo play. Fury at the thousands of Indigenous Canadian women and girls who have gone missing in recent decades, abducted, raped and killed, and often never found (or even looked for). And fury, too, at well-meaning white liberals wringing their hands at such atrocities, yet ultimately doing nothing – like the majority of those in the audience, in fact.It’s a startling, extreme show, delivered in a spellbinding performance by Cherish Violet Blood that seems to dare Read more ...