Edinburgh Fringe
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 ...
Veronica Lee
Rosie Jones ★★★★There are two versions of Rosie Jones, she tells us; one nice, one not so nice. And who knows which of those would have won the battle of psyches if the comic had not been deprived of oxygen for a quarter of an hour during birth, she asks in Fifteen Minutes. It's a terrific device – subtle but pointed, witty but poignant – as she muses about what kind of person she might have been without cerebral palsy.Jones is a mischievous woman and likes subverting people's expectations, manipulating the audience into uncomfortable moments, and then relieving the tension with a killer pay- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Luisa Omielan ★★★★Luisa Omiela, a confirmed party girl, is the first to admit she used to hate politics, and had difficulty in working out the difference between Conservative and Labour (well, that goes for most people these days, but we'll let that pass). Then a big life event occurred and it made her dive deep into how political decisions affect our everyday lives, however we vote, or even if we don't vote. And so Politics For Bitches was born.The arguments around politics are like a massive penis knocking us in the face all the time, she says, so she wants to break down the big issues for 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 ...
Veronica Lee
Alex Edelman ★★★★★When Alex Edelman first appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 he walked off with the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer. Now in his third stand-up show, Just For Us, he delivers a beautifully constructed hour of narrative comedy.He starts with Koko the sign-language-speaking gorilla and ends with how Nazis are hiding in plain sight. That he gets from one to the other in an hour that includes anecdotes about meeting Prince William, receiving anti-Semitic abuse online, his brother who competed in the Winter Olympics for Israel (“or Schul Runnings as I call 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 ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Bohart ★★★★Catherine Bohart tells us at the top of the show that she is the bisexual daughter of an Irish Catholic deacon, which is, when you consider it, a niche description. Oh, and she has OCD. That’s quite an introduction, and she more than lives up to it in this debut show, Immaculate.Her style is conversational as she rattles through her realisation about her sexual preferences and her mental health, as well her father’s reaction to them. She is very close to him, and a story about his childhood is a neat throughline in the show.His story, of emotional neglect, is of an Read more ...
David Kettle
Ulster American ★★★★★ David Ireland’s brand new, brutally incendiary black comedy gleefully tosses a grenade into any lazy liberal sensibilities at the festival (and, let’s face it, there are plenty of those). Race, gender, rape, prejudice, all and more are mercilessly prodded, provoked and picked apart in this viciously hilarious farce of ideas.Timid director Leigh (a wonderfully nervy, squirming Robert Jack) has miraculously enrolled obnoxious, swaggering Hollywood A-lister Jay (Darrell D’Silva) to star in the West End premiere of a shocking new play on the Troubles. But its Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Edinburgh Fringe is usually the high point of the year for comedy, but in truth it wasn't a solid five-star year – although there were some stand-out performers. And if the test of good comedy is the shows that stay with you, and which you want to see again, then a few are definitely up there.Chief among that group was Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, an astonishing piece of work that she says is her valedictory show. That's because making comedy for other people from her life and experiences as a gay woman growing up in a deeply conservative and homophobic Tasmania – many of them painful or Read more ...